#2003 fall

Cromartie High School

魁!!クロマティ高校

(Anime)

Parody by Eiji Nonaka

Era: 2000s

Rating: B

Plot: Perfectly normal, average law-abiding student Takashi Kamiyama finds himself in Cromartie High, a school known for both the extremely low academic standards and the scariest student body, with a collection of delinquents that include a Freddie Mercury lookalike, a gorilla, and a robot - truly, the Olympics for Badasses.

Length: 26 episides (~10 minutes)

Thoughts: A staple of early 2000s comedy anime, it gets a ton of mileage out of the visual style of vintage juvenile delinquent manga in bizarre scenarios that make little sense, like Kamiyama being crowned the toughest in his class first by being nominated for looking normal (after all, what's more badass than a rabbit living in a den of lions) and then by outlasting his opponents with incense burning on his back. We also get insights on the competitive world of submitting postcard jokes to radio shows and what makes a comedy show good via rival boss Yamaguchi who struggles with keeping his image as a badass while also trying to become a respected comedian, getting an whole school trying to discover what song is it from humming or getting sick on the bus. Occasionally we get into the hard delinquent stuff, like rival schools kidnapping a student to prove it. Only even then, that student, Mechazawa, a cartoon robot everyone sees as just a tough student who must have abs of steel. Or one of the leaders gets motion-sickness too easily, making the trip to other school an adventure... in more ways that one.

Visually it is pretty static and wouldn't be much good to talk about if it didn't use some of the advantages of early digital animation to play with movement and scaling in connection to the non-stop jokes. While it is a pretty static job (the main character even points out early on he's barely animated at all), there's often something weird going on. Characters slide in and off the background, a character's head scales until it fills the screen, one in a close-up (because this is a delinquent anime and it is the preferred angle) stretches horizontally, or Hayashida with his ever-moving purple mowhak. When it does make an effort in animation, it also gets properly weird - in one discussion between Hayashida and Kamiyama who insists every school is about as boring as Cromartie, on the tiny spaces of screen behind them you have all sorts of what usually goes down in there: Freddie in a giant wild horse, UFOs and Mechazawa. They are also walking and talking, except when they reach the left of the frame, they walk backwards.

It's a show I have some difficulty evaluating now because it's one I've come back to often, is it showing some age, or I just saw it too many times and the jokes just don't hit as well? I guess the measuring stick here should be "there's a reason I've watched it so often".

Recommended to: surreal comedy and fans of badasses

Plus:

A completely ridiculous cast of characters...

... in completely ridiculous scenarios

Worth seeing twice, original and dub

Minus:

Visually it is pretty basic, even if it works well around that.