For as much good as 2015 had to offer on the Japanese animation front, there was multitudes of bad. But only a couple shows were so bad they came out good. The first was Monster Musume, an erotic harem series with a genius twist in which all of the ladies up for grabs are terribly cute and terribly dangerous demi-humans. It's a tongue-in-cheek visual lampoon and ecstatic textbook entry of harem romcoms that was positively scintillating and hammered in the fact that me and all my anime friends are complete trash. Ahh, well, as long as we're trash, I guess it's okay that we all liked Prison School, too, right? That's the show we're going to talk about tonight. Read on, and I'll see you tomorrow on the other side of the filth. There's a beautiful tale to be shared with you yet.
Disclaimer: The nature of this anime is steeped in vulgarity, so a few of the images appending this review reflect that nature. Just a warning, in case you have a low tolerance for potentially perverse or gross imagery.
Hachimitsu Academy used to be an all-girls' school, but it has now opted in a co-ed curriculum. Kiyoshi Fujino and his posse - Gakuto, Shingo, Joe, and Andre - are the first five male students to enroll under this new policy. It's a veritable smorgasbord of babes - five guys among a thousand girls. In their quest for cheap, juvenile thrills, Kiyoshi is reluctantly wrapped up in a peeping tom stake-out, whereat the crew is subsequently apprehended by the Underground Student Council. These intimidating ladies are Hachimitsu's judge, jury, and executioners. Cross their strict gender ethics laws and you're in for some hard time after-school incarceration. How will Kiyoshi get anywhere with a girl if he's stuck behind bars and in stripes?
*minor event spoilers for Prison School are referenced in this review*
The name Prison School evokes many images in your head before you see what it's tacked onto. Like in Kill la Kill - Honnouji Academy is ruled over as a totalitarian state where students are drafted as soldiers to fight the conflicts of the student council? Is it that kind of school, but the focus is on prisoners of war from enemy academies? Or maybe it's a metaphor - a surly, misanthropic boy begrudgingly attends his studies until a beautiful girl transfers in who captures his heart; now coming to class has meaning to him, and he is in effect, a prisoner of school. The truth here is in fact quite literal. Hachimitsu is a private academy like any other, except that it features TWO student councils - of the regular and Underground variety. The USC acts as disciplinary committee Gestapo police force, enforcing total subservience to living a model high school experience. If you break the rules, you go to jail. No, not regular jail. Hachimitsu Private Academy has its own jailhouse where you serve your sentence in stripes within view of your fellow students' ridicule.
Wait wait wait wait. This just doesn't sound right. How can this be right? I've raised a million questions alone by explaining this simple setting. Okay, let's try to rationalize this. As you know from the synopsis above, Hachimitsu used to be an all-girls school. Now it's co-ed, and the crime the new boys are jailed for is peeping. This type of wanton sexual harassment is strictly acknowledged in the show as a stigma that only men possess; it is a predisposition they carry. If this is true, did the on-site jail exist before the boys enrolled? Were girls being thrown behind bars for convictions of girl-on-girl harassment, or for other reasons? It's made clear in Episode 1 that the Underground Student Council, whose sole purpose seems to be maintaining the prison, are revered as role models by the student body - so they couldn't have been established only recently. It seems obvious that the jail existed long before the academy became co-ed, but why, and how? How do you obtain funding for this kind of project, and isn't it crazy illegal to practice incarceration outside the eye of the government? Why was a jail needed in the first place, if the academy was painted as a pure, idyllic utopia only before it became co-ed? Why is the jailhouse perfectly sized for 5 detainees and no-one else, as if it were made specifically to hold our 5 male protagonists despite the evidence that it was built ages before their entrance? Why why why why?
There is no answer to these questions, but there is an answer to why there's no answer. The reason why an all-girls school suddenly became co-ed, the reason why that school has two student councils, and the reason why that school happens to contain its very own prison on school grounds. This is all suspended realism - you just have to believe in this logistically improbable reality because it was crafted in order to create an out-of-sorts atmosphere. Prison School takes place in The Real World, so there are no rules of fantasy or magical apocalypses creating the necessity for a school docket that isn't of the norm. You are forced to believe in this hyperbole even though nothing about it is obscured by mysticism. And there is no narrative obfuscation going on. This isn't Angel Beats or Haibane Renmei where the understated setting is a metaphor for a greater truth. Kill la Kill could get away with its shtick because it was established that the Japan of its world was a regionally landlocked warzone that encompassed a global conflict. There is no such higher purpose in Prison School. It's just a school that happens to have its own prison. It is blunt, thankless, and unyielding, which perfectly describes how artist and author Akira Hiramoto likely felt while drawing it.
Hiramoto is a small-time mangaka who got a little notoriety for his work Me and the Devil Blues, a biographical story of blues legend Robert Johnson, the man who famously garnered tall tales that he sold his soul to the devil at a crossroads in exchange for his talent. It got a few accolades internationally, but was very poorly received in mid-2000s Japan, where otaku-centric works were on the rise and demanding the comic industry to follow their lead. Allegedly, Hiramoto was disillusioned with the weak response to his serious attempts at storytelling and the ever-growing tide of otaku smut, so he retaliated by doing a complete creative 180. They wanted smut? He'd give them smut! Smut coated with a finely viscous glob of concentrated spite - the result was Prison School, which ironically, or perhaps prophetically, is now his most successful manga to date. You could say that Hiramoto echoed the karma of his past works and sold his own soul to the devil for popularity, but to that end he spit on the devil's boots, defiantly resigning to the madness.
Most manga can be examined thoroughly via its narrative or art or character writing to read an invisible connection with the author that tells us something about him or her, creating patterns we can peruse in their subsequent projects. Very few throw all of that in the trash in favor of drafting to the tune of a reactionary emotion. Prison School is not a style indicative of Hiramoto's talent, but a manifestation of his mood while drawing it. He is the artist angrily forgoing his free expression to paint what sells, and leaving the mark of his ire plain to see for all, as an artistic "fuck you". Prison School represents the snide, bitter id of the high-brow intellectual's stance on ecchi manga written for otaku. It's like if Miyazaki had dedicated one of his films to punching down on the nerd culture of anime he despises so much. Or maybe Hiramoto was secretly a pervert all along, I don't know - this is only conjecture. But the evidence via the story's derisive direction is strong.
That's what you get when you read or watch Prison School. You get juvenility, promiscuity, scatology, sexuality, fetishism, sadism, masochism, obsession, nymphomania - every kind of dysfunctional smear to be found in our youth turned up to 11 on the vulgarity scale. I compare it most to Flowers of Evil's deliberate visual plotting meant to make the viewer feel anxious and cognizant to their gross flaws. But Prison School isn't teaching anyone a lesson of self-reflection - hell, even that recent pathetic comedy Shimoneta's try-hard take on puberty was supposed to be like a cautionary fable. Those are stories that want their audience to grasp a moral; Prison School is vulgarity for the sake of vulgarity. It doesn't care what you think about it or what you take away from it. It subsists as a dynamic force of nega-entertainment.
With such a grimy veneer, it's hard at first to imagine why Prison School garners any popularity at all. It is tailor-made to suit an otaku's base desire, but it shifts every facet slider past the recommended values - to the point that what should be sexy is gross, what should be heartwarming is undercut by ill intention, and what should be empowering is defeating. The characters are animated with a glossy sheen, highlighting realistic skin blemishes and beads of sweat which anime usually ignores because people don't come to animation to see their own imperfections. You get your typical gratuitous shots of busty chests and short skirts barely concealing the mystical pantsu, but it's all presented in rank extremes. Not in the ways of Ikkitousen or Eiken, but with nasty exaggerations of real bodily afflictions. For example: USC vice-president Meiko Shiraki prefers not to wear the jacket from her seifuku because it constricts her large breasts and makes her light-headed. Her tendency to over-working neuroses and absent-mindedness also lends to her suffering anxiety attacks . Usually this is characterized by profuse sweating of the face - not in this anime! We get to see an ugly upskirt angle of Meiko sweating from her ass - on regular occasion - possibly stemming from some glandular disorder or just plain oily skin. There's an unhealthy obsession with disgusting bodily function and disease, including but not limited to a running joke that Kiyoshi has hemorrhoids. Prison School wades ass-forward through shit and proudly yells to the world that it is parading through shit.
Prison School is gross, and you shouldn't like it. With every fiber of its being, it tries to make you loathe it. It's hard to even say who the viewer is supposed to sympathize with. Our five heroes are tortured and beaten in cruel and most definitely illegal, off-the-record incarceration, but they were imprisoned for legitimate infidelities, and their aspirations of freedom hinge on a bro-code promising even MORE infidelities. Maybe they shouldn't be thrown in jail, but they are absolutely scoundrels who need discipline. The USC are characterized as evil witches looking to #killallmen at the drop of a hat, but their intentions are largely pure and humanized. President Mari's motivation for getting the boys expelled comes from a very simple affection - she's just looking out for her little sister, who was an unbeknownst victim to the boys' heinous peeping. Secretary Hana appears to be a perverse sociopath who engenders a personal rivalry with Kiyoshi, dedicating her existence to one-upping him for every gross boundary he has accidentally stepped over on her terms (seeing her pee, then peeing on her) - but she's really a scared, innocent girl who steels herself to acts of shame in order to regain her pride as a woman, willing to do literally anything to settle a debt. It's difficult to side with anyone. They're either poor victims with chauvinistic motives or feminazi oppressors with prideful quality. No matter what you're getting good appended with bad or vice versa. This does not mean the characters are multifaceted - just that they are all confused, wishy-washy, kind of good, kind of terrible people.
If the story fails, and the fanservice fails, and the characters fail, then why is this series as popular as it is? The answer is simple. Remember first that Prison School is not a disaster by accident - it's engineered to be terrible. Rather than anxiously trying to salvage its shortcomings into an amalgamation resembling quality - in the hopes that some poor schmuck neck deep in the genre will still enjoy it - like any normal poor production would do, Prison School owns its bane, enhancing the impact of its putridity through the story's framing. It is a show of extremities; the joy is witnessing how far it is willing to go. Stories being a litmus test of the viewer's discomfort is nothing new. Flowers of Evil and Watamote speak directly to their audience and make statements at their expense. In contrast, you watch Prison School to see how deeply it will abase itself.
The name of the game is strain. The characters of Prison School undergo intense physical and mental strain to achieve their goals, and the story frames their actions under that same level of tension. It's a show about prison, so of course one of the main story lines is attempting to break OUT of prison. But in Prison School, every single detail of the proceedings is characterized by the encompassing vulgarity I mentioned earlier. Kiyoshi MUST break out for a few hours - because he promised a girl he'd go on a date with her. Gakuto assists him in creating fail safes for the operation - including shaming himself in front of the USC to manipulate their surveillance, using a tape recorder in computer lab to record the sound of him pooping his own pants to use as a decoy while Kiyoshi is absent (they plan to use his ' hemorrhoids' to make it seem he's holed himself on the toilet), and having his head shaved as punishment for disobedience so that Kiyoshi can use the freed strands to fashion a disguise. These operations are intricate Rube Goldberg machines where every nifty cog of the machine is a piece of poop which activates the next sequential piece of poop. It's like how in detective anime characters are always one-upping each others' schemes, except here characters use the gross failures of one gross scheme to concoct branching gross contingency schemes.
It's surprisingly fun and easy to watch all of this nonsense because the nature of the production purposefully distances itself from the viewer. The characters are helpless beyond belief and the set-up so unrealistic that you find yourself more readily believing literal fantasy anime. You're a conscientious observer watching monkeys slip on their own poo and grabbing each other's butts through stained glass. But let it not be said that Prison School is rote. I can't speak for the manga, but in the anime's runtime there isn't a single boob or butt grab to be found. Most of the promiscuity is creative, new scenarios you've never seen before. And for good reason - they're deplorable extremes. But never once is this depravity concocted for the benefit of the audience. To call what it employs 'fanservice' at all is tampering with the definition. I mean, I'm sure SOMEONE out their gets off to this stuff, but I've never met them. I imagine Hiramoto-sensei's intention is to bait his readers, DARING them to unzip their fly and jerk it out. "All you want is smut, huh? Well, try jacking off to THIS filth," I can picture him saying with a satisfied chortle.
You can currently find all subbed and dubbed episodes of Prison School streaming online at FUNimation. No home video release in the U.S. has been announced at this time.
"These operations are intricate Rube Goldberg machines where every nifty cog of the machine is a piece of poop which activates the next sequential piece of poop." Pretty sure you're not going to be able to top that sentence.
ReplyDeleteThe literary geek in me is kicking myself for not replacing one notion of the word machine with a synonym like "contraption", but otherwise it's high up there
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