Cromartie High School: Review

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: a robot, a gorilla and Freddie Mercury walk into a Japanese high school…If you know what happens next then you must have watched the Cromartie High School anime.

Cromartie High is crazy, unpredictable, and totally random. Nothing makes any sense, and even though you’d imagine that one thing should follow another, it never does. It’s as if there was no script and the director told the animators, “Dude, go nuts, we’ll make it make sense after you’re done.” For some reason, that’s why Cromartie High is so hilarious and such a success. Cro High lampoons the life and times of Japanese high school delinquents and takes every tough guy stereotype type out there and rips it a new one.

Cromartie High takes place at, you guessed it., Cromartie High School; one of the toughest schools for juvenile delinquents in all of Japan. Takashi Kamiyama, a mild mannered, well groomed and intelligent young man, lands for reasons unknown (“Read the manga!” insists Kamiyama) in Cro High.

Kamiyama definitely doesn’t belong among these fierce, unruly delinquents and finds himself at the center of attention the first day of school. Everybody at this all boy’s school is a bad ass and sports a bad ass nickname like “Hospitalizer” or “Junior Fire Ball of Class 3”. Kamiyama on the other hand, has only the non-intimidating nick name of “Errand Boy”, and if you don’t have a bad ass nick name, well, hang it up.

In an effort to find out who’s the biggest bad ass in the class, everyone boasts of their misdeeds to see if they can top each other’s story. According to Shinjiro Hayashida however, the title of top bad ass should go to Kamiyama. He compares Kamiyama to a rabbit that lives among lions, saying “That would be one bad ass rabbit.”

While Hayashido’s moody purple mohawk seems unusual at first, it’s nothing compared to Gorilla who is indeed a real live gorilla attending Cro High. Then there’s Mecha Zawa, a smooth talking robot that has no idea he’s a robot, even though he oils himself through out the series.

The piece de resistance, though, is the thirty-something student with no shirt, red suspenders, and handle bar mustache that’s a dead ringer for Freddie Mercury from the band Queen. There’s no doubt that he is Freddie Mercury; they even call him Freddie and there’re countless shots of him singing into a microphone, even though he never says a word.

Kamiyama and Hayashida are the only two at Cromartie High who seem to think there’s anything unusual about the other students and the weird random happenings that never end. I mean, it’s not too strange for aliens to crash into your high school and kidnap Freddie Mercury, right? Or for a robot to be riding down the street on a motorcycle, get into a wreck and be rebuilt as a mecha motorcycle, right?

I laughed my ass off with every single episode I watched. I thought the gags and jokes would get stale and tired after a while, but everything was fresh and unique. The timing for the jokes was excellent and I have no complaints in the originality department either.

The animation was sort of minimal but I liked it. It was well suited to the anime and fit the subject matter perfectly. The characters themselves even mention that they think the animation is crappy. It was kinda creepy, though, that they depicted 16 year old boys as 23 year-old men.

Each episode of this brief series, based on the manga by Eiji Nonaka, is only around 12 minutes each but they’re packed to the gills with absurdity and random nonsense. The music was great and the DVD’s are outstanding. The menu screens for each DVD could stand alone in their originality and randomness.

This is a series well worth owing and watching over and over. You never know when you’ll see something you missed the first five times and snort soda through your nose all over again.

Out of a possible four gummies