Reviews Manga / Assassination Classroom

Anime review: Okay series, bad adaptation

Assassination Classroom is a manga very much tailored to its medium, due to a variety of quirks in how it's told. Thus, when the anime adaptation was announced, I was both excited and wary about seeing my favorite moments animated. With the first season now finished, I can safely say my wariness wasn’t misplaced; the anime has basically no idea how to make the series work as an anime.

As weird as it is to say, the primary problem with the anime as an adaptation is that it’s both too faithful to the manga and not faithful enough, with little compromise. For the former point, most of the manga is faithfully adapted; the problem with that is the manga is predominantly episodic, and one manga chapter is not enough to cover one anime episode. Thus, multiple standalone chapters are adapted together into one episode, with little transition between them, making the overall storytelling incredibly disjointed.

This is more apparent in earlier episodes, where the episodic plots were more abundant, but the problem returns with a vengeance near the end of the series. It corresponds to an arc in the manga where an ongoing plot is divided into episodic subplots, each of which is one chapter or so. The anime crams 2 or 3 of these subplots into one episode with little to no thought on how these transition into each other or factor into the larger plot.

The middle of the series tries to compromise by cutting chapters altogether, but that ends up going too far in the other direction. Since the cut chapters were primarily spotlights on Class E members, a lot of their characterization is excised along with these chapters. Anime-original content doesn’t help that, since most of it exaggerates all the characters to a few key traits, nuance be damned.

Production-wise, the series is okay. The visuals are distinctive, but the animation itself is only okay. Visual metaphors are either represented well or become so over-the-top they lose impact. The soundtrack is hit-and-miss, and the series tends to milk the hits for all they’re worth. None of the VAs are particularly great; Korosensei’s VA in particular isn’t a bad actor, but he’s not a very good Korosensei

In the end, the anime is still entertaining. However, it’s entertaining mainly due to the strength of its source material, and all it really adds back is Flanderization and disjointed storytelling.