If a person says, “I feel like watching anime tonight,” what does that mean? It probably means that this person wants to watch an action-packed, clever and finely animated series with interesting characters, a bit of humor and epic stories that are intelligent but don’t make your brain work too hard. As such, “Kabaneri” fits the bill perfectly, delivering in every way that an anime is supposed to. If you can imagine a steampunk train rolling through zombie apocalypse, that’s “Kabaneri.” Essentially, it’s about a population living on a traveling train and headed by a Japanese clan who must confront both zombies (called “Kabanes”) and other humans to survive. Yes, it bears more than a passing resemblance to the “Walking Dead” series (zombies) and the great “Snowpiercer” movie (train population after apocalypse), but it presents its own original universe and detailed mythology. And how many times can you say that a program about zombies looks lovely? The visual design and backgrounds are amazingly colorful and picturesque, with excellent hand-drawn animation. Even if you’re not a zombie or anime fan, but you like intelligent and exciting action drama, you should watch this one.

2021 Update: I’m surprised they never came out with a second season.

Not For Kids
Japanese with English subtitles

Extra:

• If it weren’t for anime like this and other Japanese works, hand-drawn animation might have gone the way of the dinosaur and that would have been a shame. Hand-drawn can have a certain quality and dimension that computer animation never attains.
• This is one of the best anime programs done in recent years. The episodes fly by; they go really fast. And there are only eleven.
• I took off some “points” because the program didn’t give itself enough time at the end to explain why things happened the way they did, leaving viewers scratching their heads and wondering about a couple of things. The last episode is so crammed with content that it doesn’t even have a title sequence, and the end-credits appear while important things still are going on.
• Streamed from Amazon Prime.