The Spring 2025 Anime Preview Guide

Apocalypse Hotel

There is a solitary hotel in Tokyo's Ginza district. After society has collapsed, humanity has disappeared, and nature has begun to reclaim most of the land. Despite the lack of guests, Yachiyo is a hotel management robot who continues to manage the Ginzarō Hotel alongside other robots. Together, they continue to maintain the hotel while awaiting the return of its owners and guests.

Apocalypse Hotel is an original anime project by Cygames Pictures. The anime series is streaming on Crunchyroll on Tuesdays.

We humans are crazy things. Not only can we feel empathetic towards other people or animals, but we can also extend that empathy even to non-living things—things without thoughts or feelings of their own. Nowhere is this clearer than in a show like Apocalypse Hotel.

It's easy to feel sorry for these robots. They've been left alone for decades—breaking down one by one—as they wait, hoping that (the likely extinct) humanity will return from the stars or the bottom of the sea. For a human, such a situation would be torture—the loneliness and lack of true purpose soul-shattering.

However, we see that the robots have gotten on rather well. Unlike humans, they know the meaning of life. They know why they were made and what they were designed to do. They have pride in this knowledge, and their programming makes them want to do what they were made to do to the best of their ability. They take pride in it.

Of course, after so many years, errors have occurred. They have had to grow and adapt in the little ways they can. But without new parts and maintenance supplies, things are reaching their limit. And so the manager—the last android robot—is dealing with the robotic version of an existential crisis. She is preoccupied by the idea that one day, all too soon, she too will break down forever.

It is something as tiny as a missing shower cap and no way to replace it that drives her over the edge. It marks the first true failure of her mission and makes her realize that the two jobs she's been assigned—managing her employees and keeping the hotel perfectly ready for guests—have fallen into conflict. This is her lowest point. And it's then that an alien walks through the door, making for both a great gag and a way to move the story forward. I can't wait to see where things go next week.

The first review I ever wrote—of anything, ever—was for the Pixar movie WALL-E. I was a sixteen-year-old movie fanatic who counted Roger Ebert as his personal hero and inspiration (I'm sure this fact is shocking to you), and I was so spellbound by the melancholy romanticism of Pixar's magnum opus that I felt utterly compelled to try and put my experience with the movie into words. I can't remember if or how I would have posted it online—and I certainly never shared it with anyone in my personal life. Still, given that it's kind of where this career of mine got started, you can say that I have a soft spot for apocalyptic fables about obscenely adorable robots that are just trucking right along in an empty and desolate world.

In other words, Apocalypse Hotel is an anime that was tailor made for me, specifically, and I love everything about it. It simply nails that mournful-but-gently-satirical tone that fits this particular subgenre of science-fiction so very well. Would you be surprised to learn that my favorite video game of all time is NieR:Automata? Of course you wouldn't, because WALL-E and NieR:Automata are companion works that serve as a triumphant culmination of this storied history of philosophical treatises on our species' Sisyphean efforts to find understanding and empathy in a fundamentally absurd universe, and in this essay I will—

Dammit, I'm sorry, I almost got consumed by the “Shameless Media Academic” part of my brain that I usually keep under control with a steady diet of trashy anime and social-media doom-scrolling. Anyways, the point is that Apocalypse Hotel is the kind of art that I could lose myself in for hours upon hours, even if we were to just consider it as a mood piece. Yachiyo's valiant efforts to maintain the operation of the Gingarou Hotel are equal parts heat-warming and haunting, and the show's art direction perfectly contrasts the round and colorful robot designs with the bleak, decaying Earth of the year 2157. My first reaction was to be thankful that her robot programming has kept her from going completely insane over the course of the last century, but her late-episode freakout over the missing shower cap makes it clear that the hopelessness of her staff's existence is probably all she ever thinks about. Thank goodness she has the reliable and steady Doorman Robot to be an emotional rock to lean on, even if she ends up having to punish him for his shower-cap thievery.

Did I mention that the show is entertaining as all get-out. I know my fixation on it's more melancholy aspects might give you the impression that Apocalypse Hotel is a stone-cold bummer, but that couldn't be further from the truth. It's got ace comedic timing and enough genuine heart to balance out its darker aspects. In short, this premiere is a functionally perfect 22-minutes of television. I wouldn't change a single thing about it. It just goes to show that, sometimes, the best slice-of-life stories are the ones that take place in a ruined desert devoid of any human life! Or, you know, something like that.

There's an ineffable air of sadness to Apocalypse Hotel that I, perhaps, should have been expecting given the title. Apocalypses are rarely joyous events, nor do they bode well for the hospitality industry as a whole. But I was still struck by the increasingly desperate air of the robots staffing the Gingarou Hotel as the episode went on. From the moment Doorman collapses from overheating, things start to feel a little bit bleak, going to the depths of Hotelier's despair when she completely loses it after the shampoo hat in one of the many unused bathrooms goes missing. Things have been building to her mental breakdown from the scene with Doorman (although there's an admirable effort to play it off as funny), but the hat is the moment when she just…can't.

If you've ever felt badly for an unused or obsolete appliance, felt mournful over the hulk of a ship stranded on the shore slowly falling to pieces, or seen an old farming tool in an abandoned field and wondered what happened to strand it there, there's a good chance that this opening episode will make you a little sad. It's the same basic thing, except that Hotelier and her colleagues are more sentient than a hand-cranked apple corer. They remember being left behind when the humans fled the Earth. They believe that the humans will come back, rendering them useful again. And all of that begins to take a toll on Hotelier specifically, possibly because she's the last of the humanoid robots. She feels the weight of expectations beginning to crush her.

I don't think this is going to be a sad series, however. Everything is building up to her despair so that we can see her snap back to life when, at long last, a guest comes through the door…even if that guest isn't quite what she's been expecting. But the joy of having purpose again is enough, and the reveal of who's come to stay is also pretty funny. Although the episode shows hints of humor throughout, from Doorman's repeated collapsing to how Cleaners 1 and 2 bump into each other on purpose as they roam the halls, it's not until the plot is at its darkest that it fully embraces it. That's the sort of juxtaposition I probably should have expected, given how the opening goes between the soothing ad copy for a luxury hotel and the increasing “infortunium” pollution that drives humans either beneath the sea or into space.

All of this is to say that I don't think Apocalypse Hotel can be accurately judged by one episode. It's going to take another one or two to see where this is going and what its mood is going to be, and I think it'll be worth the old three-episode test. I'm intrigued, at any rate, and since that's what a first episode should do, I'd call this well played.