by Dan Tabor
Assassination Classroom, which screened at Fantastic Fest on Friday, is the latest spin on the Manga phenomenon which sold over 10 million copies in Japan. This film directed by Eiichirô Hasumi is his fourth Manga adaptation and it’s easy to see why, given how perfectly he captures both the charm and humor of the original source material, while also adapting it into a feature film format.
Assassination Classroom is the story of Class E at Kunugigaoka College, which is basically the dumping ground for the failing, unwanted and unteachable at the elite school. Things change however when the homeroom teacher for Class E turns out to be a 7 foot, yellow, tentacled creature that just destroyed 70% of the moon and has vowed to destroy the Earth in a year as well. That is, unless one of his students can assassinate him first. While the premise sounds a bit like Battle Royale with an alien, the film instead goes the more comedic action/adventure route and plays with the common tropes in anime and manga that fans have come to expect with a very heartfelt twist.
See, the creature affectionately nicknamed “UT” for Unkillable Teacher genuinely attempts to turn the class around and teach his students to succeed, while also giving them the tools they will need to eventually kill him. Since these are students, they are given special pellet guns and rubber knives to aid them in their tasks. They are meant to react with the creature’s chemistry while being harmless to anyone that doesn’t share his genetic makeup. To raise the stakes even further the Japanese government is offering a reward of ¥10 billion (i.e. 100 million USD) to whoever in the class can kill UT and save the planet. This incentive also brings in the occasional ‘transfer student’ or robotic killing machine under orders from The Ministry of Defense to try to finish the job.
Assassination Classroom is a lot of fun and I was taken aback both by its humor and its warmth. It plays out like a Dangerous Minds or a Stand and Deliver, but where the end goal of the students is to not only care about their education, but also learn to kill their teacher, a giant yellow octopus who plans to blow up the earth. We’ve seen a lot of Manga adaptations miss the mark recently due to there being just too much story to condense into a film length narrative. Assassination Classroom manages to focus more on the tone of the piece and then build the narrative around it with a great cast made up of a lot of very capable fresh faces.
Other than the spot-on script, the other thing that surprised me was the character of UT. When I first heard about the film, the thing I was probably most apprehensive about was how the yellow creature was going to look and interact with his fellow characters given so much relied on him. But I was very surprised at how good he looked while also being faithful to the original design.
I loved Assassination Classroom and can’t wait to see what’s next. The film manages to be both accessible and entertaining to both the established fanbase and those that may not have heard of this fun property. I can’t stress enough how funny and heartwarming this weird little film is. You get the feeling the UT really cares for his students, but there is something else driving him to destroy the earth that we get just a glimpse of in this film. Like most recent adaptations this is only part 1, with part two titled Assassination Classroom: Graduation to be released sometime in 2016 which will complete the story.
Assassination Classroom was definitely my biggest surprise at Fantastic Fest so far and could be one of my favorite, non-ironic live action manga adaptations to date.