What is Prison School exactly? Is it an Ecchi? Harem? Hentai? Romance? Nope! Prison School, at its core, is a bromance comedy with tons of hilarious sexual humor. The comedy is first-rate and this is probably the funniest anime I have ever watched. The humor was raunchy, the timing was spot on, the characters were bizarre and uncomfortable. It was great.
The plot can be summed up in a few lines. After a foiled attempt at peeping on the girls’ shower room, the five male students at an all-girls high school are sentenced to serve a month in the on-campus prison which is run by the tyrannical and estrogenic “Underground Student Council”. The series takes us through the boys’ absurd, demeaning and hilarious trials and tribulations of Prison School Life.
What’s immediately noticeable about Prison School is how blatantly unsexy the series is. For all the obscene physicality--the tits and ass--there is a marked lack of either sexual gratification or tension between the characters. It’s more than just an icy, Fem-Dom thing too—the female characters were almost completely asexual in terms of personality and response to their surroundings (I’ll come back to that later). The only sexual tension occurs between Hana, the sadistic student council secretary, and Kiyoshi, the hapless protagonist, but their bizarre and absurd interactions are skillfully engineered to make you laugh, not fap. As a caveat, I should mention that there is going to be a subset of people who genuinely find the concept of scantily clad women beating the shit out of male anime characters more erotic than comical, but I will leave it up to the viewer to decide which category they belong in.
I’ve heard critiques that Prison School objectifies women but it’s hard to know which gender gets it worse—which makes it hilarious. On one hand, the women in the series are all sexually objectified up the wazoo. T&A abound to a gratuitous degree. Some characters get more screen time for their boobs than their face. Equally unflattering for the ladies is the ultra-prudish attitude of the all-female Underground Student Counsel and the bland naivety of every other female cast member. They are unreasonable, humorless, reactionary, sadistic and domineering.
Now on to the guys. The male characters are essentially hormone-driven, loser sex slaves---they are confined, beaten and humiliated daily. But this is O.K. because they are resilient guys who take everything in stride and, on some level, kind of like the abuse. Theirs isn’t a struggle for human rights, justice, or equality—no no---they fight back to protect the things that really matter to them, like managing an ant colony, procuring a rare collectible action figure or keeping a date with a cute girl…
While every character in Prison School is ‘fleshed out’ in some sense, only the male protagonists are fleshed out in the personality department. This whole show is a parody of a young man’s awkward and graceless journey through adolescence.
Overall, I would highly recommend this anime to anyone who enjoys finely-crafted, filthy humor and has enough self-awareness not to take this anime too seriously.