The Winter 2015 Anime Preview Guide

Assassination Classroom

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Hope Chapman

Rating: 3.5

As its title may indicate, "AssClass" is one of those anime that displays a distinct tendency to become silly. Then again, that's the very best thing about the show, and the only thing that appears to separate it from the giant. homogeneous throng of shonen manga adapations: "school story about misunderstood underdog boy and his friends in fantasy situation #1,490,263." The production and execution on display is certainly reminiscent of that breed. The episode is workmanlike, simple, and heavily expositionary. There's nothing bad here, but on the surface, AssClass definitely wouldn't merit a second glance from anyone looking for something above the line of generic manga adaptation. Thankfully, Assassination Classroom has its strong and squiggly silly genes out in full force, allowing its cheeky tone and extremely unique central character (the yellow fellow with the healthy smile) to vault expectations and make this first episode just a little bit special.

"Koro-sensei" is a writhing octopoid alien mass who has come to earth to blow it up, Marvin the Martian style, but he's decided to wait out a full year before carrying out his mission. In that time, he comes to an agreement with the governments of the world, who find themselves unable to exterminate him. He would like to spend his pre-destruction year on this planet as a schoolteacher, fostering the young minds of earthlings who have flunked out of their own schools, while also offering them the chance to try and assassinate him, to save their planet. He seems to be doing this purely out of good faith, which makes him a head-scratching "antagonist," likable and entertaining, and wholly unique in his weird alien anatomy, which is explored and explained throughout the episode's run. If the show and its characters around him were more unique, I would almost certainly rate it higher, but really, all three and a half of the points my heart gives to this show belong to Koro-sensei. He's a great character with a truly unusual and endearing motivation, and even the show itself doesn't seem very interested in exploring the students in his class and how they feel about their bizarre task (yet.) It's all about Koro-sensei, and Koro-sensei is the show.

At this point, it's all potential, as an anime equal parts "most generic thing ever" and "wholly unique and fun thing I've never quite seen before." The direction and writing mean everything to AssClass' future success, but given that its source material is beloved with shonen manga enthusiasts in Japan right now, it's definitely worth taking a look-see.

Assassination Classroom is available streaming on Funimation.com.

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Nick Creamer

Rating: 3

The first episode of Assassination Classroom is exposition-heavy, but that's pretty unavoidable - the premise here is completely absurd, and requires a little explaining. In short, a bizarre, smiling, tentacled monster has blown up the moon, and now is threatening to blow up the earth as well. Human weapons are virtually useless against the speed of the monster, but the creature has fortunately offered humans a deal - it will teach one high school class for one year, and in that time, all the students may do their best to kill it. Either they succeed and earn themselves a tidy fortune, or they fail and the earth is destroyed.

Yeah, there's no making sense of this one. The premise is basically just an excuse for the show's actual priorities - having fun with the wacky monster-teacher, presumably showing off lots of violent assassination attempts, and setting up a story of the Big Guy versus the Little Guy. You see, the class that this monster (known by the end as Kuro Sensei) has chosen to pick is actually the E class of its school, meaning the students are all looked down upon and feel powerless in their world. The student protagonist Nagisa is reflective of this powerlessness, and spends much of this episode fretting over his invisibility, and how he actually kind of appreciates the fact that at least this teacher pays attention to him. There's a real youthful myopia to Assassination Classroom - its passions and themes seem reflective of an attitude deeply embedded in the unhappiness of lonely adolescence, and though the show doesn't necessarily seem far enough beyond that perspective to meaningfully reflect on it, there's definitely a personal passion to the story being told.

The one other noteworthy element of this first episode would be Kuro Sensei himself - his playfulness (“Didn't I tell you not to let assassination interfere with your studies?”) really helps keep the episode moving. And the character designs are also quite nice, as the decision to maintain the varying line thickness of the characters helps them to pop off the more drab backgrounds. Overall, Assassination Classroom seems like a fairly trifling but overall fun ride if you're looking for a silly action show, or just something about underdogs banding together. It's fine light entertainment.

Assassination Classroom is available streaming on Funimation.com.

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Rebecca Silverman

Rating:  3  (out of 5)

One day the moon was blown up. The culprit turned out to be a giant yellow octopus-monster with the smiley face from Watchmen for a head and a strangely perky personality. The octopus declared that in one year he would destroy the earth as he had the moon...but first, if you don't mind, he'd like to teach class 3-E at a specific academy, thank you very much. The government, confused but seeing a way out of this mess, agreed on with two caveats: one, the octopus-monster is not to harm any students, and two, the students are to be allowed to try and kill him. Welcome, friends, to the assassination classroom.

On the surface, this looks like a first episode that wants to shock you. It opens with a scene of a room of middle schoolers whipping out guns and trying to kill their teacher while he takes attendance. While we do find out soon after that anti-sensei bullets can't harm people, it is hard to deny the impact this scene is going for. Later a similar scene has primary protagonist Nagisa throwing himself on the teacher while wearing a grenade, and for a little while it is assumed that he was, if not killed, severely injured in the attack. Interestingly enough, both of these incidents give the teacher, eventually named Koro-sensei as a play on the word “korosenai,” or “unkillable” (more or less), a chance to show his own humanity and devotion to his students. And that, as it turns out, is very important, since class 3-E is made up of the kids who couldn't cut in in regular classes. It's a way to ostracize them and make them feel invisible and worthless. Koro-sensei, however, sees each of them and take the time to explain things in ways that make them easy for each student to understand. When you come right down to it, the implication is that he's the only person who really cares about these kids. How can we reconcile that with his apparent goal of destroying the earth?

In a lot of ways this is very much an introduction to the story. It lays out the plot (kill the teacher), explains the class, and then goes on to show us what the different colors his face turns mean. We don't really get much beyond that apart from a little development of Nagisa, and in some ways it feels rather rushed. The source manga is excellent, however, and as the story gets more complex, hopefully the anime will prove that it can keep up. The animation does improve a bit on the original manga art, particularly in the faces, which no longer look so flat, and the movement of Koro-sensei's tentacles is fun to watch, even if there's something unsettling about the “hands” on their ends. Jun Fukuyama does a great job of bringing Koro-sensei to life, stealing the scene more oft than not.

There's actually a lot to think about in this episode, making it a nice mix of intellectually interesting and action-packed. It isn't hugely strong on its own in terms of great first episodes, but it certainly sets the stage and the expectations for the rest of the series, and both manga fans and those who haven't read it should find something to like in this story of the murderous octopus-monster and the kids he loves to teach.

Assassination Classroom is available streaming on Funimation.

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Theron Martin

Rating: 5 (of 5)

Review: The third-year class at Kunigigaoka Middle School has a quite unusual task: they have to assassinate their teacher before graduation – and the teacher, who happens to be a smiley-faced, betentacled, alien-looking creature eventually named Koro-sensei, is actively encouraging them to do it.

This, in a nutshell, is the fantastic premise of Assassination Classroom. The name and the premise alone are enough to pique interest, but plenty of other factors at work in the first episode will keep viewers coming back. In a more detailed sense, the creature, who appears to be alien but is apparently an Earth-born creation, can move at speeds of Mach 20 and has already vaporized a large chunk of the Moon. For initially-unfathomable reasons the creature has opted to become a teacher and put forth a challenge: the 30 students in Kunigigaoka's Class E must kill him by March graduation or he will do to the Earth what he did to the Moon. The students are given special weapons that will harm only the creature and promised an immense cash payout if they can pull it off. Thus students make varying vain efforts to take the creature out, with a girlish-looking boy named Nagisa as the apparent focal point.

If that was all there was to the first episode then it would still be a pretty good one, as Koro is a thoroughly delightful character. He is a bad guy that is almost impossible to hate, as that smiley-faced look and flippant attitude is so thoroughly disarming, and watching the reactions of the students to his bizarre behavior (they have to compose a poem who last line is “was tentacles all along,” for instance) can be quite amusing. The opener is a peppy dancer number, and the more sedate closer is no slouch, either. And of course you have students trying to come up with creative ways to off their teacher, which plays to that perverse hidden urge that many a student has doubtlessly idly considered. (Please note that I am specifically meaning this in the casual frustration sense, not the pathological sense.) All-in-all, it's really a pretty amusing show.

Two factors elevate above the base level, though. One is the great irony that, despite his threat to destroy the Earth, Koro is a pretty good teacher. He actually seems to care about the students, to the point of insisting that the assassination attempts not interfere with lessons or studies while still encouraging the creativity of their efforts, and the only time he ever gets seriously cross with them is when one of the attempts actively puts Nagisa in harm's way. A sobering late episode scene shows a dying scientist suggesting being a teacher to him, which implies that there may actually be a much deeper point and motivation to Koro-sensei's actions.

The other factor is Class E itself. Though the reasons aren't exactly clear yet, it is portrayed as the dregs of its school, a bunch that has been abandoned both by other teachers and fellow students at what is apparently a fairly prestigious school. Unlike the most of the rest of the episode or a series like Baka and Test, this aspect is not at all handled frivolously, and it is implied to have a great deal to do with why Koro opted to become a teacher for this specific class. He didn't choose Class E because they were expendable, but may have instead chosen them because they desperately needed someone to give them purpose and drive again. In a twisted away, that could be interpreted as a scathing indictment of a Japanese education system that, according to this episode's suggestion, is perfectly willing to let some underperformers slip through the cracks so that it can focus on its high achievers.

That the episode managed to be so wonderfully fun and whimsical while still smoothly working in such a potent subtext is why I am giving this series my strongest recommendation. Maybe this is striking a little closer to home for me because I am a career middle/high school teacher by trade, but it certainly looks like it could offer far more than its initial impression indicated.

Assassination Classroom is currently streaming on Funimation.com.

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Zac Bertschy

Rating: 3.5

Class E at Kunugigaoka Junior High has been tasked with something out of the ordinary by the Japanese government: assassinate this giant yellow smiley-face tentacle alien who moves faster than sound, left a giant hole in the moon and swears that Earth is next unless these misbegotten urchins can wipe that smile off his face. Another wrinkle: he's their teacher, alias "Koro Sensei". Everyone in Class E is a misfit or an outcast, Nagisa included - a forgotten boy who learns quickly that their Koro Sensei has little respect for anyone who doesn't respect themselves, and he starts learning the value of self-worth during a botched assassination attempt that winds up targeting the families of the three kids in class who hatched it. They only have until March to save the planet, and right now, they're out of ideas.

So this is a massive Shonen Jump hit - you've probably seen the giant yellow smiley-face guy around in marketing materials somewhere - and it's alright. This is a straightforward adaptation of the first chapter of the manga, complete with weird flashback to Koro Sensei's past, animated with workmanlike efficiency and big thick outlines. The story is weird enough - it's a somewhat complicated mashup of a number of different elements from kid fiction, and in execution it reminds me of a slightly harder-edged version of those "My Teacher is an Alien" books you might've read in middle school. This first episode is all explanation and setup, and for my money the most telling thing about it is that it focuses on Nagisa's realization that he has to have some self-worth even though he's a misfit if he has any intention of taking out Koro Sensei, which puts this firmly in "boy, it's a weird premise for a show, but ultimately it's all power of friendship/teamwork/believing in yourself messages" territory, which is fine, but it doesn't seem like suddenly it's going to launch into anything too complicated anytime soon.

Assassination Classroom is entertaining, perfectly acceptable in terms of production quality and if you haven't read the manga, this is a great way to experience the story. Just don't expect it to blow your socks off or anything - so far it's pretty standard shonen stuff resting beneath a polished, initially shocking veneer of sci-fi weirdness.

Assassination Classroom is available streaming at Funimation.com.