Oh great, another show set in “high school” with super high-achieving kids. Like I haven’t seen this one before…wait a minute… This isn’t a super-powered high school students show. What is this?
What They Say:
Fourth Tokyo–one of Japan’s new prefectures on Mars. Kirishina City, Fourth Tokyo’s special economic zone, is home to the Kirishina Corporation, an elite corporation renowned for its aerospace business. The company has been expanding its market share in various industries, while also running a private school, the Kirishina Science and Technology Academy High School. That alone would make it unique, but there’s also a high-profile class on campus…
The Review:
Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)
Sometimes, the greatest surprises in a season come from unexpected sources. When I discovered that Fumiaki Maruto, the writer of this past winter’s panderfest Saekano: How to Raise a Boring Girlfriend had a new project coming out in the summer called Classroom☆Crisis, I was at least curious because despite my feeling that Saekano was largely a missed opportunity, there definitely was some sense that Maruto has some talent as a writer. When I saw the initial promotional key art, showing two female characters who definitely hit some regular target demographics among anime fans, I felt that I could already gauge, to some degree, what might lie ahead. A somewhat better school rom-com, at least featuring some pretty girls and above-average writing, even if it would cater to the usual otaku tastes, including the normal focus on “amazing” high school students who would end up doing “amazing” things. It might be worth checking out an episode or two.
I could not have been more wrong.
Perhaps I should have looked at the other half of the team involved in guiding this property: Kenji Nagasaki, who previously directed No. 6, and Gundam Build Fighters. Those are not shows I would normally name in the same breath as Saekano, simply because they are very different properties that appeal to different target audiences. When you put the two together, what do you get? Something very interesting is the answer.
When it starts off, we are introduced to the members of ATEC, the elite of the elite among students at the Kirishina Corporation’s private high school, mainly attended by the children of company employees and those who aspire to careers with the giant aerospace company which has slowly been diversifying into various businesses and has became a powerful conglomerate. But ATEC, whose members are both students and employees of Kirishina, are still focused on the original core industry of the company, the creation of rocket engines, as this is a space-faring society that in fact has begun to rely more and more on extraterrestrial (Kirishina itself is headquartered on Mars, which has pockets of terraformed (no insects required) habitation) resources to power human civilization. Under the stewardship of Kaito Sera, who is both a genius rocket scientist and also their homeroom teacher, the students of ATEC are like a high school version of MIT or Caltech students. The “crisis” that starts off the series, however, is when a new transfer student, due to arrive that day, is instead discovered to have been taken hostage on a mining colony in the asteroid belt (asteroids have become the main resource hubs for everything needed for space travel and industry). While the company executives hem and haw over how to handle the ransom demands, ATEC springs into action to save their soon-to-be classmate.
So, of course, star pilot (and otherwise quiet, shy girl) Iris Shirasaki jumps into the class’s prototype spacecraft and races to the colony to save their new transfer student. While the ship takes quite a lot of damage along the way (flying through asteroid fields is, you know, difficult), she makes it there just in time…to see that the transfer student didn’t need any help in the first place.
That’s because the new classmate, Nagisa Kiryuu, even if he’s just a third-year high school student (so, about 17), is already an accomplished and experienced corporate manager, having been moved around from posting to posting by his elder brother and superior Yuuji Kiryuu. So instead of being killed by his captors (which might have suited Yuuji, who is no loving elder brother), Nagisa has instead bargained with them and brought them over to his side. Iris’s trip was entirely for nought, though the damage to the spacecraft is extensive and does nothing to help ATEC’s reputation, among the company top brass, that it’s a waster of resources that could be better put elsewhere. And so it is soon revealed that Nagisa is not only transferring into ATEC but is also being appointed Kaito’s new boss in the corporate structure, with a mandate to dismantle ATEC.
So…now do we get to the real “classroom crisis?”
Well…yes and no is the only answer I can offer. For while the show seemingly is about the contest of wills between Kaito and Nagisa, as ATEC on the one hand fight to stay alive while Nagisa and his subordinate Hanako “Angelina” Hattori from the Accounting Department on the other do their best to remove ATEC’s budget and existence, to reduce everything to that is to ignore the way the show and its characters begin to spread outward. At no point is a giant and unacceptably unreasonable leap made, the story just grows organically bit by bit until you have a quite complex internal corporate battle going on, escalating to the point where the opposing sides even engineer the rigging of parliamentary elections that affect all of Japan in order to win their internal battle to control Kirishina.
Wait…what?
Yes. Classroom Crisis is a show of layers. And layers upon layers. And layers within layers upon layers. It’s also a show that loves to play with misdirection. You think it’s a show about teenage whiz kids and their inventions. It’s not. You think it’s an office politics story with an “evil” executive trying to beat down the “good” engineers. It’s not. You might have been misled by the early promotional art and description that it’s some kind of future kids school rom-com. Not even close. Sure, there might be a little romance thrown in (what story can’t do with a little romance?), but it’s not the focus. So what is this show?
It’s a taut and suspenseful (sometimes too much, especially with the two late in the run episode-ending cliffhangers) thriller of politics in its dirtiest forms: corporate and governmental. Tied up with the ugliness of the adult world.
About the only letdown might come towards the close as the show moves into its final arc. While never abandoning some of the smarter writing that Maruto is capable of (the “main” villain, for example, does not suddenly mutate into a cartoonish monster, chewing up the scenery—that role is left to a more minor villain whom we thought had been disposed of earlier), it also stumbles a bit with a very contrived and forced plot that is meant to force a crisis (yes, there is that word yet again) upon the members of ATEC. They must decide whether to proceed with a risky, but safer course of action that could spell their organization’s survival or change gears and take a far, far greater risk that could doom them to disbandment…but potentially save one of their own who is now in lethal peril. Making the denouement such a stark choice might well make for high drama, but it also can’t help but feel slightly exaggerated in all respects. While Truth may indeed be stranger than Fiction in many ways, a situation like this could only happen in a story created by the human mind. The entire constellation of events required to make it happen don’t line up so easily in the real world.
So, Classroom Crisis winds up for me being a very interesting and challenging (in a good way) thriller with just a minor deduction in points (thus the “–” part of the grade) for deciding on framing the final crisis as an old-fashioned underdog story where we see a very unbalanced confrontation play out…with the expected last minute surprise coming on cue. Then ending will most likely make you cheer, though it might also feel a bit anti-climactic after all of the sharp twists and turns the plot takes before we arrive at the final chapter. Still, the story does many things well, which includes throwing in a modest lesson about how very important the human element is to all things, a lesson which has been there all along from the start if you were paying attention at the beginning.
In Summary:
Classroom comedy? Classic David vs. Goliath tale? Corporate political thriller? It’s hard to know exactly what Classroom Crisis is at times. What is clear, however, is that it’s not just a story about a group of super-smart teenagers and their genius inventor teacher pitted against a greedy and unscrupulous corporate executive. That may be the initial setup, but from that rather narrow confrontation—the crisis of ATEC’s survival—a broad and sweeping story spreads out its wings, a story that shares as much with complex tales of court intrigue in the realm of a (possibly dying) empire as it does with the silly antics of Japanese high schoolers going about their normal lives. Hard to imagine? Perhaps, but here is your chance to see it happen.
Series Grade: A-
Streamed by: Crunchyroll
Review Equipment:
Apple iMac with 12GB RAM, Mac OS 10.10 Yosemite
Nice review G.B. I followed this show on another blog site (didn’t have time this summer to actually watch it) and it seemed to get better as it went along. I’ll probably make some time in the near future to marathon it and see what I missed out on.
Thanks for the review!