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Anime Reviews: Your favorite anime sucks!

GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka

By Tim MacKenzie

GTO – Great Teacher Onizuka is not your standard anime. There aren’t powerful superheroes, lovey-dovey romance stories, ridiculous plot arcs, or a typical cast to round things out—in fact, even though it is a story about high school, it’s something a bit different. You see, Onizuka is a young man who wants to be a teacher and his initial intentions are less than noble—simply to see high school girls. But through the process of beating the crap out of bad students, employing arbitrary (and sometimes shocking) teaching techniques that irritate the vice principal to no end, and lowbrow humor, Onizuka winds up being a great teacher—and GTO becomes an awesome anime series.

The story is more or less Onizuka’s quest to become a teacher, and although the very idea of basing a plot around school life sounds ridiculous, it works out very well. It’s not really comparable to a work like Azumanga Daioh, however. While Azumanga Daioh was less about the story and more about the humor of day-to-day life for the crazy girls, GTO instead prides itself more on its injection of lowbrow humor in most scenes and some heartfelt moments of trauma or redemption. Many of the kids use absolutely terrifying pranks to get Onizuka fired, and not only that, but he also must help many of them with their troubles. The concept sounds dumb and cliché, but there are some truly engaging moments in the storytelling, and Onizuka’s crude “teaching methods” become really satisfying. Some episodes do stand-alone, however, there are plenty that are divided into multiple parts (usually 2 or 3), and thankfully the show feels like it’s always moving forward and Onizuka is constantly improving. Unfortunately, the end of the show seems to come quickly despite its 43-episode run due to the nature of the story progression, but that’s not a big flaw—the show is still a hell of a ride.

So here’s a short synopsis for those interested: basically, the anime begins with Onizuka, an ex-gang member, trying to find a teaching job. His first job lands him with the “O” class at a rundown school. The kicker is that the kids are all delinquents and there isn’t a beautiful girl in sight. Luckily for him, Musashi Seirin Academy is going through a bit of a crisis, so the principal considers hiring him. He’s even more overjoyed to see a beautiful teacher like Ms. Fuyutsuki working with him. However, that’s pretty much the only lucky streak Onizuka will ever see. Class 2-4 is the worst of the worst. There are extreme bullies who nearly caused a student to kill himself, a scheming student who uses influence in the PTA as leverage in anything, a group of kids who deface teacher’s reputations with a little computer wizardry, and even more. The last homeroom teacher who taught them ended up having a nervous breakdown, and the one before that? Still missing. So it’s up to Onizuka to get teaching.

The animation is not one of the series’ main attractions, even though it is all right. It is an older anime, so it is a bit more forgivable though. In short, the animation gets the job done, but don’t expect anything flashy. Characters move decently and the lips seem to sync up fine with the dubbing, but there aren’t many scenes to really show off any impressive animation. Most fight scenes don’t last longer than a few punches, or at least until Onizuka does his thing. Anime fans will most likely get a kick out of the expressions that Onizuka has though; his face often distorts into amusing caricatures when he’s trying to act tough (well, he IS tough, so he’s not just acting after all).

The dubbing of GTO is just great. All of the performances are well done, and although some of the students’ voices are annoying, they do seem in character regardless. David Lucas covers Onizuka himself and his voice is simply perfect for the role—he has the right sort of cocky attitude conveyed in his speech. The anime’s writing and humor is brought out effectively by the English dubbed cast, so this is one where dub may actually end up just as good, if not better, than the sub in the end. The music is also excellent. The original opening by L’arc~en~C’iel, titled “Driver’s High,” is an awesome song to kick start the show. The music that plays during the episodes is also fitting and well done.

As far as value goes, FUNimation is planning on releasing the series on DVD boxset soon, with Box Set 1 released on August 7th, 2007, and Box Set 2 released on September 18th, 2007. The first set contains 23 episodes and the second contains the remaining 20—not a bad deal. The estimated MSRP for the sets look to be $50—and luckily Right Stuf is offering a sweet discount on the pre-order of said sets ($37.49 each). All of the extra features don’t seem to be much to look into, but getting the complete localized series is not a bad deal at all. If you enjoy a comedy anime with a great deal of substance, this is one to check out. You won’t be disappointed.

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