Melonade blog

Apocalypse Hotel is a very good discovery I made this season. Bizarrely I didn’t see much media coverage about this anime, but it’s completely the highlight of the season for me. The initial situation is unique enough, quite deep in consequences but simple to understand.

Humans died, the few left fled earth long ago. Amidst the ruins of civilization, a team of hotelier robots maintain the Gingarou hotel, waiting for the return of human customers.

The pacing of this anime is its highlight. Each episode had two unique things very well made:

• An homage to a genre of anime. Each episode reuses design tropes and styles from a specific genre of animation. Some episodes look like funky mecca, reminding me a lot of FLCL. Others will be detective dramas, and others will be peaceful disney-princess like strolls.
• A mood. Some episodes will bask in rage, nostalgia, or crush the viewer under the immensity of time and space compared to a human life. All of these mood are always painting a background of peaceful bliss, which makes viewing any episode both a pleasure and an intense experience. This mood is set with subtle hints that do not feel at all like forcing things.

I usually don’t care that much about character development, but it felt that even the robot characters evolved a bit. Especially at the start of the anime, the hotel and the world around is lifeless. They decided to only show the few moments in centuries where something interesting happened and changed the way the characters evolve in their environment.

Even though I adored this story, I think it wouldn’t make sense to create a second season, and if done, I would probably be disappointed in it. Each episode in this series has a specific meaning and place in the plot, this organization does not leave space for a good sequel. The last episode was open-ended and felt like a real ending. I can see myself coming back to this series in a few years, watching it again and trying to catch references. A lot of things that look inconspicuous at first ended up playing a big role down the line :)

All in all, this anime was a pleasure to watch on release. I suspect it will be a bit too heavy in meaning and intensity to binge-watch comfortably, but splitting watch in three episode sessions sounds like a good plan. I would recommend this anime to anyone interested a bit in science fiction. I just realized that it gives the same feeling of immensity as book series like Fondation by Asimov or The Three Body Problem by Liu Cixin. But in this story humanity is never the focus, what we focus on is what humanity left behind – an hotel full of silly robots doing their best to accommodate clients. The characters are (mostly) harmless and smooth, definitely do not watch this show if you want a gritty post apocalyptic story.