Gedou Gakuen (1994-96) is a Japanese OAV from writer and director Kōji Yoshikawa. Gedou Gakuen was released in five forty-minute episodes over the course of two years. The film combines elements of horror, fantasy, and high school melodrama to create an amalgam not dissimilar from Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend (1989), though Gedou Gakuen is distinctly a hentai whereas Urotsukidoji is not.
Aside from the overt influence of the seminal Urotsukidoji: Legend of the Overfiend, Gedou Gakuen barrows conceptual aspects of Call Me Tonight (1986) as well as some of the humor of the La Blue Girl OAV (1992). Yet the world that filmmaker Yoshikawa creates in Gedou Gakuen is distinctly his own. It’s a film that pits demons against gods in a bid for global control that is acted out on a school campus, allowing for allegories regarding the dangers of fascism and organized religion.
However, in the first two episodes of Gedou Gakuen, the focus is entirely on the relationships between human and demon students that explores themes of sexuality and identity. The emotional core of the series, that is the romance between Masao and Yuko, is forged in these two episodes and will drive the dramatic thrust of the following two episodes.
But as Gedou Gakuen progresses into the third episode, introducing the gods and exploring anti-fascist themes, the narrative begins to lose focus. The central romance is usurped by the dramatic power struggle between the demon gangs and the disciples of the gods. And just as the plot begins to deteriorate, so does the quality of the animation.
Gedou Gakuen was never as breathtakingly stylized as Call Me Tonight or Urotsukidoji though it did boast some excellent character designs. By the fourth and fifth episodes though Gedou Gakuen began to look more and more like low budget pornography. In the fifth episode especially the combination of gratuitous sexual violence and cheap animation becomes particularly tiresome. The looping of motion animation in the final episode is a far cry from the varied shots and “x-ray” effects of the sex scenes in earlier installments.
The issue with an OAV like Gedou Gakuen is that more often than not they overstay their welcome and push their narratives beyond their natural conclusion. In the beginning the hentai sequences in Gedou Gakuen were grounded in some form of narrative or character necessity but by the end such scenes feel as forced as the many new plot twists that Yoshikawa arbitrarily introduces. Still, as far as hentai goes, Gedou Gakuen is one of the more engrossing ones I’ve seen from this period.
