Heal Your Soul With ‘Attack on Titan: Junior High’

If you’re a fan of hit anime series Attack on Titan, you are no stranger to absolute pain and despair. The series (which began as a manga created by Hajime Isayama) is a masterclass in storytelling, world building, and character work, but also in using all of those things to absolutely shatter your heart with shocking plot points, deaths, and visuals. With the anime currently airing the last half of its fourth and final season weekly on services like Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Hulu, the pain train only continues to chug along in the lead-up to an epic ending that promises destruction on a colossal (Titan) scale.

Luckily, there’s a surefire way for AoT fans to heal their aching souls while still indulging in the series’s content, and that’s by watching Attack on Titan: Junior High, a comedy series adapted from Saki Nakagawa’s comedy manga spin-off of the same name which takes the source material’s characters you know and love and puts them in the treacherous and dramatic world of… middle school. Titans still exist, but instead of devouring human beings, they steal school lunches (which is where Eren’s anti-Titan grudge stems from in the series. RIP, Eren’s cheeseburger).

Characters gone too soon are brought back for silly school hijinx, and this, coupled with the fact that the show is voiced by the original series’s Japanese-language voice actors (including seiyuu legends Yuki Kaji, Hiroshi Kamiya, Romi Park, and Ono Daisuke), makes Junior High a delicious and joyous must-watch for fans of Attack on Titan and anime in general.

In Attack on Titan: Junior High, we are given the gift of watching our beloved AoT characters trade in life threatening situations, intense political drama, and moral dilemmas for the simple joys and embarrassments of middle school life (it’s just so nice to see these poor characters get to enjoy life and, well, being alive, you know?).

Childhood pals Eren Yeager (Kaji), Mikasa Ackerman (Yui Ishikawa), and Armin Arlert (Marina Inoue) are looking forward to beginning their careers as junior high students, but run into trouble when they find that their new school, Attack Junior High School, has a side for humans and a side for Titans, terrifying, genital-less giants who wreck havoc by stomping around and stealing the food of unsuspecting humans. When a Titan steals the cheeseburger meal (his favorite) that his mom made for him for lunch on the first day of school, Eren vows to eliminate the world’s Titans and often screams about it (leading many of his fellow students to find him a bit crazy).

Each AoT characters has had a canon trait of theirs dialed up to an 11, for example Eren’s hatred of Titans, Mikasa’s devotion towards Eren, Jean Kirstein’s (Kisho Taniyama) endless (and usually fruitless) pursuit for popularity amongst the ladies, and Levi Ackerman’s (Kamiya) passion for cleanliness, making for many moments of hilarity and ridiculousness that are only all-the-more enjoyable when paired with the characters’ new adorable “chibi” designs.

The show’s 12 episodes do an especially wonderful job of playing with the tropes of the usual school-set comedy anime, incorporating everything from unrequited love to sports competitions to club activities (one such group is the delightfully ridiculous Wall Cleanup Club) to tests of courage. There’s even a musical number performed by Levi, Zoë Hange (Park), and Miche Zacharius (Kenta Miyake) somewhere in there.

Perhaps what’s most striking of all are all of the extra Easter Eggs shoved into Junior High just for fans of Attack on Titan‘s manga and anime. Not only are memorable characters like tongue-biting Oluo Bozado (Shinji Kawada) and Jean’s bestie Marco Bott (Ryōta Ōsaka) brought back with roles even larger than they had in the original anime series, but some lines from the original series are repeated verbatim (mostly to heighten the show’s comedy), and some future AoT plot points are even teased and foreshadowed in, frankly, impressive and almost shocking ways considering that this anime came out way back in 2015.

Attack on Titan: Junior High is definitely any Attack on Titan fan and general anime lover’s dream, and should be required viewing for those of us watching Attack on Titan: Season 4, Part 2 in order to heal our souls and sleep soundly once more. Check it out now on streaming services like Funimation, Tubi, Amazon Prime Video, and have a cheeseburger or two while you’re at it (it would make Eren and resident food-lover Sasha Blouse (Yu Kobayashi), proud, after all).