Assassination Classroom Anime

 Assassination Classroom is an action anime released in 2015 by Lerche. This production company is famous for School-Live, a show where students are fighting in a zombieapocalypse while still trying to be students, and Danganronpa, a show where students aredesperately trying to kill one another. Seeing a pattern here? I am. Lasting for two full seasons, with 53 episodes total Assassination Classroom covers not only whatit means to be an assassin, but also a model student, all wrapped in apremise that borderlines the absurd. What do I mean by that? Well, ladies, gentlemenand others, today on Glass Reflection we are going tobe looking at the story of E-Class’s journey out of failure, as well as theyellow octopus who makes it all happen:

 ASSASSINATION CLASSROOM. Let’s jam. Welcome to Kunugigaoka Junior High, a schoolwith a very interesting history and tradition. Following the doctrine of the school's principal,under-performing or otherwise delinquent students are sent up a nearby mountainto the school’s old campus as a punishment of sorts. Isolated from the restof the school, these delinquents face a trial-by-fire wherethey are expected to either shape up or come to terms with their lot in life. Enter Koro-Sensei. This is where things get weird. A mysterious octopus-looking alien being,Koro-Sensei, claims responsibility for the recent destruction of Earth’s moon.He also informs the world that in a year’s time he plans to do the same to Earth. Their only hope is to assassinate him beforethis happens. But unfortunately for them, he is a super-poweredcheat code of a being, able to travel at Mach 20. Thankfully though, he also laid the conditionthat during the Earth’s final year he plans to take up the mantle of teacher to the aforementioneddead-end class of delinquents with the goal of nurturing them not only intobetter students, but also better people.

 The students are now tasked twofold: graduatefrom junior high in one year, and also kill the octopus before Earth isdestroyed. You might have realised that this sounds kindof absurd. Why would an alien both want to destroy Earth,and also decide to teach some random class of junior high kids? an act which would benullified at the end of the year regardless, unless they successfully kill him. The crux of the whole show is actually tryingto unravel the premise into something that makes a lick of sense. But in the end, thepremise is almost brilliant in how it achieves Koro-Sensei’s actualgoal of nurturing the students. These kids all have problems that got themto where they are, and honestly the biggest obstacle for any of them to improve would justbe getting the motivation to do it. Hell, I sometimes have a hard time motivatingmyself in the morning just to get out of bed, so I understand. But the end of the worldis a hell of a motivator. At the same time though, the show likes toput a lot of emphasis on its comedy. It uses the absurdity of the situation tomake light of things, from the backstories of the students, to introducinga super advanced AI as a virtual student, to having a language teacher called Bitch-Senseidue to her developed looks and snarky attitude.

 But the comedy is not the show’s strongsuit, which might confuse you if you look at it too briefly. See, you could view the harsh contrast betweenthe show’s attempt at comedy and its more dramatic attempts at teachingthe students life lessons as a negative. You might be tempted to think that the showis unfocused and doesn’t know if it wants to be a comedy or an action drama. But I lookat it slightly differently. The comedy of the show is more like a mask,a front, or more like the armor of the show. It’s something put into place to cover andprotect the more serious heart of the narrative. It helps that not much of the comedy landslike it’s supposed to, which only adds to the nature of the front.

 As “LOL, random!” or obvious as some ofthe jokes tend to get, the increased levity is an overall boon to the series as it attemptsto build these characters into greater versions of themselves. Well, as bestas it can anyway. One of the slight downsides to this is thatthe cast is rather large. It’s a full classroom with almost thirtystudents, not accounting for the three teachers, groups of students from other classes, andthe myriad antagonists over the course of the show. It’s not an easy task to try and developthis many characters effectively. This leads to the majority of the studentshaving only a few notes to them, while a decent amount of development is insteadspent on the big three, or the RGB characters if we go by their haircolors: Karma, Kaede, and Nagisa. Outside of the RGB crew, the most we get isabout half an episode’s worth of development per student. It’s enough to individually showcase whomost of the students are and the quick minor adjustments that Koro-Sensei can make to massivelyimprove either their lives or their outlook for the future. Some of these workvery well with little effort. Isogai, the class president with a poor financialbackground, landed himself in E-Class after being caught working part-time outsideof school to support his family. Others, like the aforementioned AI Ritsu,gets almost instantly back-burnered after her introduction unless the class needsa MacGuffin hacking method to advance the plot, and even then she’s susceptible to beinghacked herself and becoming absolutely useless. While the large cast of characters is nicefor the variety, and while the show does try its best to keep most of them from beingone note, there’s only so much it can do, even with 50+ episodes. But while the spotlight on any one studentoutside of the main cast is few and far between, there are plenty of times when the teamworkof the group as a whole makes up for it. Of course, this doesn’t mean that the storiesof the main cast suffer as well, quite the opposite in fact. Karma, an intelligent but underachieving mastermind,gets a worldview swap into actually giving a damn about people other than himself,with a reasonable arc to facilitate that to boot. Nagisa, on the other hand, is almost the completeopposite.

 He cares very little for himself to the pointof making a kamikaze strike against Koro-Sensei as one of his first assassinationattempts. The duality of these two characters and howthey slowly journey to a more productive middle ground is the key to their individual arcs and iscultivated by Koro-sensei’s unique methods. Koro-Sensei himself is the enigma of the series. His personality is primarily portrayed bya smile very rarely leaves his face, and his mannerisms are shown as varying tentaclemovements. You don’t really know why he is doing whathe is doing or for what purpose, but very rarely are we ever made to believethat he doesn’t have his students’ best interests at heart, despite their almost constant attempts onhis life. Credit for my enjoyment of his character thoughmust come down to both of his actors. While I at no point doubted the ability ofJun Fukuyama to pull off the bizarre idiosyncrasies of Koro-Sensei, I have to fullyadmit that the English performance by Sonny Strait caught me offguard. Honestly, the English dub for the series ingeneral is probably one of Funimation’s best from the past several years, in part because how easy it could have beento screw up such an off-the-wall character like Koro-Sensei. Butin full honesty, they nailed it. Now, the title of this series contains twowords: assassination and classroom. While the former is how it started, the latteris how it ended.

 Though the assassination aspect of the seriesnever fades, it doesn’t end up in the forefront as often as one might expect. Largely, I found the series to be a modern version of one of my favourite classic anime, Great Teacher Onizuka.It’s a series about a less-than-average teacher, finding great success in obscure methods toteach not only his students, but also the audience, some very importantlessons that they can take with them beyond the end of the series. Assassination Classroom is very similar. It’s not just a show on how we could learnto teach kids – in fact, I would wholly suggest we do NOT do this to kids becausethat could get dangerous real fast – but rather the show ends up having some veryentertaining things to say on how we can teach ourselves for the better, whetherwe are students or not. It’s not the easiest show to recommend atits start, but if you’ve seen it all the way through, I hope you’d agree with me that it was totallyworth watching. Assassination Classroom just has this level of fun to it that’shard to describe. It’s art style is sharp and colorful, so even being about trying to kill some alien squid creature, it also feels like it’s like everything I wish school actually was like. Not only didI enjoy watching this series about a bunch of underdogs learning to accept themselves andbuild their personalities for the better, but I feel like to a point I learned a thingor two about myself as well. And for that, Koro-sensei, I thank you. So it shouldn’t come as a surprise thatI rate Assassination Classroom in its entirety as Certified Frosty, a rating for only thebest of the best or those shows too important to ignore. It's really a fantastic series that I reallyhad a hard time trying to write about. It’s just one of those levels of.... it’svery easy to rant about things you don’t like, its harder to find things that you do likeand be able to explain them in a way that people can understand. It’s really just a fantastic series andI hope that you’ll check it out after watching this video. Which you can do, over on Funimation, andI’ll put links down in the description for your benefit if you decide to check it out. If you need further watching however, theaforementioned Great Teacher Onizuka is another fantastic watch if you can lookpast the 20-year-old animation. My second recommendation goes to SayonaraZetsubou Sensei, which leans far more into the comedic side about a teacher whokeeps considering suicide on a regular basis. Neither of these recommendations is availableon any legal streaming services at the time of writing however, but Onizuka can be picked up fromDiscotech on home media, at the very least. Lastly, a very special thank you to my patrons,without whom I would be unable to do what I do, so I am eternally grateful. Specifically though,I want to give particular shout-outs to patrons Siri Yamiko, Ryefan Boneapart, Rune Jakobsen,Calhoonboy, Richard Emil Bradley, and Hector Montemayor for being especially awesome. You guys aregreat! And until next time – ladies, gentlemen, and others – watch more anime… and stay frosty.