Prison School

Prison School is by far my favorite anime this season! I'm a big fan of Great Teacher Onizuka and it's the first time in years I've had the same kind of enjoyment watching a comedy. I'm usually not a big fan of over-sexualized female characters or harem animes but prison school is an exception. Story 9/10 5 perverted teenagers end up in a school full of girls. They peak into the girls bath and get grounded into a prison set in the middle of the campus. These 5 guys are hilarious, one is fat as fuck, one is creepy as fuck, one is geeky as fuck... Thegirls in charge of them AKA the Underground School Council, bully them, torture them, insult them. This kind of treatment gives them boners lol All the comical elements that build up in the series are pretty similar to what would happen in GTO in these kind of weird sexual moments. Art: 10/10 The art is flawless. The action scenes are fast paced and you never get bored. Great attention to detail. Nothing bad to say about it. Character design is fine too and there's a lot of panty shots. Sound: 10/10 eeeeh, not a fan of the opening or ending. For the sake of giving Prison School a 10/10 I'll just give the sound a 10. The voice acting is awesome though. Character: 10/10 AMAZING. The 5 guys are funny as hell, the MC kyoshi is kinda lovable and cute while his friends are just creepy sexual weirdos. Since they're always stuck together they create great bonds and funny homoerotic quiproquos. The girls in charge of the prison are as fucked up as the guys. AND THE CHAIRMAN OF THE SCHOOL DESERVES AN AWARD. Enjoyment: 10/10 You will not get bored. I swear. Overall: 10/10 yep

First, I’m going to have to say what Prison School is about. Because I’m honestly still trying to wrap my head around the concept and the hundreds of planning paper I bought at Office Depot isn’t helping. In some weird universe where parental absence is even more out-of-place than normal by anime standards, there is a private girls’ academy called Hachimitsu (not gonna dignify that name with a response) that has recently started to admit boys for no particular reason like some gender-reversed version of Zoey 101. However, Hachimitsu is an academy that’s far from being suitable for the Nick-audience viewing. It’s a harsh place wherethe most minor of infractions will cause you to get treated like a literal prisoner complete with wearing the stereotypical white and black outfits or face expulsion, which is something the five boys who transferred to the academy learn the hard way after making the stupid mistake of trying to peek into the girls’ locker room. Although why they’d want to is beyond me, considering every single girl in this show is less sexually appealing than Bayonetta in clown make-up. In fact, come to think of it, what exactly happens to these boys after they get expelled, considering they don’t exactly seem to be learning anything as is? Well, it turns out they want to stay so they can see a girls’ wet T-shirt contest that’s supposed to occur sometime in the future. Something I find very hard to believe actually exists in this academy - which is quite a feat considering everything else that goes past the headmaster’s eyes. Prison School is an incredibly difficult show to summarize because it seems like it was based on somebody’s Madlibs and the guy who filled it out was off his meds that day. I get that it’s supposed to be combining prison exploitation films with the standard “anime harem/school” tropes, but some things just don’t combine, like the Hercules legend and Michael Bolton. Every single element of the series is so contradictory to another element that I have a hard time trying to find out what I’m supposed to be caring about and more importantly, what I’m supposed to laugh at. So the vice-president punishing the boys for being perverted shows ample amounts of cleavage in school? These girls hate the male form and yet they’re open with showing their vaginas to them and the audience at every opportunity? There’s a guy who really loves ants to the point that he’d die for them? There is a gun in my drawer with a special mechanism that only fires the trigger if I’m pointing it up my nose? Oh sorry. My head was getting overwhelmed and I was thinking for a fast way to clear some thoughts. This whole show plays out like a South Park episode that was stretched to twelve times the length and stripped of all the life, memorable characters, great movie parodies, and subversive topical humor that still played by the rules even when it showcased a magician entertaining kids by sawing his penis off and hiding it behind a kid’s ear, causing it to fall into the same lifeless monkey cheese the shows it tries to parody fall into. Get past the presentation and all Prison School is is another goddamn story about the opposite sex trying to fit into a same-sex school and discovering what qualifies as romance in this medium whilst being about character types rather than characters. And unless you’re one of those people who really like over-the-top art styles, you’ll get tired of the presentation real fast. The humor relies entirely on overreacting, awkward situations that the characters narrate to the point that the joke overstays its welcome (which is any length of time above zero seconds), or just being nonsensical for the sake of being nonsensical. And unusually for a Tsutomu Mizushima anime - and especially compared to JC Staff’s other perverted comedy that aired in the same season - the comedic timing is completely awful, so forget laughing. I know Funimation has never been above being a little liberal with translations, but poking the bear aside, I find it very hard to believe that video games even exist in this universe. And once that thought entered my mind, the shock chuckle I got from seeing that became like the shock chuckle of seeing a piece of wood stuck down someone’s sphincter: incapable of provoking an emotion from me other than confusion. As far as I’m concerned, this show isn’t the least bit as edgy or gritty as it thinks it is. It’s more like a desperate dad trying to make his baby smile by stretching his face out and go “abloogeewoogeewoo”. And when that’s not working, he tells the kid about all the fucked-up things he saw in the world like a twelve-year old who doesn’t know any better. Who’s the baby at that point, huh old man? There’s this stupid conversation between the male students and their principal in which he’ll allow them to stay a little longer if they can tell him whether or not boobs or asses are better and why that is. The punchline is supposed to be that being perverted gets you rewarded, which I think has only been used in at least ten different gross-out comedies, as well as every Kevin Smith film ever. Most of all, I don’t even care about the semantics regarding which is better. It’s a dumb conversation to have in real life and it’s dumb in fiction. Another memorable attempt at the show’s desperation was when the closest thing to a male lead tried to sneak out of the school in order to show up for a date. Let’s be generous for now and say we give two shits for if he actually shows up or not, but the attempts at hiding his break-out are just pathetic because it’s very obvious he won’t get caught until the episode ends at the very least, and the punchline is always that he avoids getting caught due to last-minute circumstance that’s too weird to be funny. I’ll admit to smiling a bit at the defecation radio because that actually seemed possible in reality, but that’s it. But I think the biggest thing that got to me was the finale. First off, it was incredibly obvious who was going to win in the end and the plan to achieve said end was pretty damn simplistic in of itself with virtually no twists to the formula or any attempt to make the characters less boring resulting from it. And yet the show drags the plan out for three episodes just so it can cram in a hundred more overlong “oh shit, I saw a woman’s privates” joke whenever it spots an opportunity to do so whilst tying up loose ends that quite frankly missed the mark for payoff ages ago. Yeah, South Park itself has a tendency to overreach, but not to this extent. Second, I won’t spoil the final result, but I felt nothing for anybody after everything was wrapped up, and not just because of the rampant yet confusing sexism. Because at the end of the day, nothing’s changed aside from certain circumstances. The characters have achieved nothing, learned nothing, will never be remembered for anything, and have certainly not learned how to be funny to anyone older than twelve. All the suffering they went through? What exactly was the point of it all? Please tell me. I’m dying to know. I’ve heard some people who acknowledge this show’s problems by saying it gets by on the tension. As we’ve covered before regarding Detroit Metal City, I find this impossible to feel when the show has an over-the-top style that is ALWAYS on. It NEVER takes a break to have the characters actually act human or feel like they’re in real danger. Imagine if the intrigue in Gurren Lagann was dealt with using the same “who the hell do you think I am/raw raw fight the powah” atmosphere as mostly everything else in that show. We’d think Imaishi wasn’t taking the audience seriously, or that Baz Luhrmann somehow broke into the industry. When they say style can be substance, they don’t mean keep the style on 24/7. Because even the most powerful religious symbolism gets old if you just hammer in the same verse over and over. No likable characters, no funny jokes, not a lick of sense regarding anything that happens, and whatever tension that’s supposed to exist throughout the series is undermined by the fact that I’m watching a bunch of Daily Lives of Highschool Boys rejects constantly trying to perform bad stand-up comedy. Final grade? Utterly forgettable.

Prison School is a good anime, although it sometimes fails to play to its strengths and descends into pointlessness. I don't look to anime for sexual gratification; so when I criticize the censorship, I'm not doing it out of blue-balled resentment. (Well, not just that anyway.) It detracts from the quality of the animation, and it's often just unnaturally forced into the scene, to cover things that don't really need to be covered. They can indirectly depict urolagnian debauchery but they draw the line at panty-shots? Prison School has nice animation, but it's difficult to appreciate this when so much of it is censored. Honestly,I kind of wish there wasn't quite so much sex-appeal. I want to be able to just watch and laugh without having to make the sign of the cross every three seconds. A lot of it was just for the purpose of humor, but when we got into territory that was more clearly aimed at arousal, it got a bit more uncomfortable. The series could have been better if it stopped trying to tickle my boner and started focusing solely on tickling my funny bone. (I can tickle my own boner, thank you very much.) Speaking of how Prison School could have been better, the characters were something of a minefield placed over a gold mine. Characters like Hana, Vice President, the Principal guy, Kiyoshi, Joe, and Gakuto were great. But then there's characters like that one guy who had no personality, but got kind of pissy sometimes and that's all we really know about him so how can I really be expected to know his name, and Mari, who I find to be rather flat compared to characters like the Vice President. (Haha. Flat.) And then there's Andre. He is filth. He is the most disgusting character, the most repulsive thing, that I have ever seen in any anime. No, in anything. Every time he was on the screen, I felt tears welling in my eyes and beginning to drip down onto my cheeks as my body shook with dry heave after dry heave after vomiting fit. The creator of this character should be shot. Or just killed. I suppose it doesn't matter how. But he must be brutally murdered (or just murdered, I'm not picky) before he releases another Andre into the world. But it's a testament to the strength of the best characters that the presence of Andre does not result in an automatic 1. Instead, the good, borderline non-existent, and terrible characters balance each other out. I just wish we saw some characters more often. (Like Hana. I want more.) The plot is absurd; it barely exists, and what is there is ridiculous, but it still maintains somewhat of a sense of internal consistency, and it works. The premise is bizarre, and a lot of the plot developments just make it weirder, but it has a beautiful sense of logic to it that would make Hegel turn green with envy as he realized the insignificance of his boring collections of meaningless compound words. But whatever. You should probably forget everything I've said up until now. And I mean everything. Forget everything I've ever said in my life. The most important thing is that Prison School is very funny. It could have been better in a lot of aspects, but it succeeds in entertaining its audience. It's unique and hilarious. You won't find anything else like it, and it's not easy to find anything funnier. If you watch it, you will laugh, unless you suck. It's a comedy; it's comedic. There you go. It's a success. That said, the gags can get very repetitive, (Despite the changing of details and introduction of some new sexual situation, it's still the same damn joke. And somebody needs to tell the mangaka that a running gag isn't just a copy-and-paste thing; you actually have to be creative to keep it funny.) but they don't quite over-stay their welcome. A lot of the time, when Prison School seemed to get stale, it changed just enough to keep you going for another episode. But, towards the end it really isn't that funny anymore. Not laugh-out-loud funny anyway. Ramping up the vulgarity does not equate to increasing the funniness, and it's sort of a cheap tactic. Instead of watching this anime, you should probably just read the manga. Think about it. It covers a lot more of the story, it has minimal censorship, and the panel format sometimes lends itself to better comedic timing. (Mostly just the first two.) And what did it really gain in the adaptation? The boring OP and ED? I am unimpressed. But if you absolutely refuse to read manga, then that's fine too. I would still recommend the anime, provided that you know what you're getting into. A 7 seems about right for Prison School. It is very flawed, but the entertaining parts are entertaining enough for me to call it 'good.' It's certainly better than a lot of other anime out there.

I really wonder how the Japanese regulatory departments allowed such an anti-masculine anime to be made. Throughout the anime, we see boys being humiliated and girls who seeking power and sadism. Boys are defined as sensual animals who only care about physical and sexual desires, and girls are creatures to be protected. The foundation of a normal school and education has been questioned and we are witnessing the promotion of a wrong kind of feminism and anti-men. And worse than that, we see boys who accept and adapt to the unreasonable tyranny of girls instead of dealing with it rationally. In no country and no school does the student councilhave the right to beat and physically deal with students, even if the student is a murderer. I really feel sorry for the creators of such animes that promote violence against men and the wrong way of being a feminist. This anime is nothing but entertainment for sexual perverts.