GTO: The Movie

Eiichi Onizuka used to be a street tough and has become a teacher. In this film he is sent as a substitute to a school in a small, finished town in Hokkaido. What he finds is a class that does not attend and trusts nobody, and a town in its own collapse. Onizuka's method is not teaching: he ignores the rules and tries to change the situation the children are actually in, getting himself into trouble repeatedly along the way. The character comes from Tohru Fujisawa's manga and became very popular in Japan through the 1998 television series with Takashi Sorimachi; this film was made as a continuation of that series. Anyone who has not seen the series will find some of the relationships underexplained. What works is that Onizuka does not see his students as unfortunates to be rescued; he treats them as adults, and that is where the comedy comes from.