DESCRIPTION

CAST

MANGA ComedySakigake!! Cromartie Koukou
TV SHORT ComedyDi Gi Charat

REVIEWS

• 

  StrawHatIrene

  90/100
  Have some fun in your life. Accept Cromartie High School into it.

  There's a lot of ways to say screw it, and not care about what makes animation technologically pretty. You can make character outlines really sketchy, you can eschew in-betweens for your key poses, you could literally just shift your characters across the screen. Cromartie High School goes the latter route somewhat, letting its extremities lift any concerns about its low-budget feel. It's a classic TV animation principle: you're not watching Space Ghost Coast to Coast for good animation, but because the writing and situations are batshit and hilarious. If we're going way back, you're not watching Danger Mouse, Rocky and Bullwinkle, or Roger Ramjet for anything visually impressive. Let your prejudices against "bad animation" go for this one, or else you're just gonna look like a damn fool.

  Characters are scaled bigger and/or smaller as they speak, still shots are repeated if needed, character designs are copy-pasted, random background elements will pop out of bare nowhere, stock images are used in place of drawings on more than one occasion. And all this does is add to the joke. Cromartie High School is a parody of delinquent anime that takes every opportunity to be as silly as humanly possible. There are no teachers because who cares? Any acts of delinquency are largely ignored, unless they need to make a joke about, for example, Takenouchi's extreme motion sickness. It's wonderful. I love it.

  
  
  Freddie Mercury is there just because. There's a soda can-looking robot that they do anything EXCEPT take good care of. The leader of an opposing school is actually just intensely into comedy. There's entire episodes about a satirical take on cutesy mascot anime that have little to do with the main cast. The gorilla gets an entire episode about working at a sushi shop based on a singular gag in the previous episode, and none of the established characters besides Mechizawa's little brother do so much as show up.
  
  It's a seriously funny anime that echoes several low-budget peers of the 20th century. It's somewhat of a shame Adult Swim never got its hands on it, because really, this is exactly the type of show that Cartoon Network airs at 11 pm. It's short, has barely any smooth or flashy animation to speak of, and lets the clever writing and characters do the work for it. Well, I say clever, but standout jokes can range from genuinely smartly written ("We need a sumo wrestler on car two") to "our robot is now a bike, we are spending the whole episode with our main character doing cool things on the robot bike". I must add that said episode decides to have a clip show towards the end, and none of the clips have much relation to each other in the first place. If you really care about that sort of thing, you've got to loosen up a little bit. Have some fun in your life. Accept _Cromartie High School_ into it. You'll thank me later.

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• 

  Kalladry

  80/100
  Over-the-top, surreal, absurd and humorous, a show that will surprise you with how fun it is

  Dearest mother,
  I have completed my enrollment for Cromartie High School. I hope to get used to the school as quickly as possible and lead a healthy, academic life.
  But.
  I’m surrounded by people who, frankly, scare me. Annnd, I’m kinda freaking out.

  I vaguely remember hearing about this when it came out in 2004, but a show about a high school full of delinquents didn’t interest me. Fast forward over a decade, and I came across a Tumblr post with the first couple minutes of the first episode (while I can’t find the video, here’s a post with screencaps that only manage to capture about 50% of the humor and absurdity). Over-the-top, exaggerated, this wasn’t a straightforward show about delinquents like I’d thought, but rather a parody. I was hooked.

  The fun thing about it is that you don’t really need to know what it’s parodying. Obviously, you’ll probably get more context if you do–I know a few stereotypes about delinquents picked up from 20 years of anime and manga consumption, but for the most part, I don’t know much–but the narration and animation do a good job explaining the basics you need (all the boys look like delinquents. All the boys assume they and others are delinquents, while at the same time many of them have other goals, weaknesses, and/or spend time philosophizing).

  (According to its Wikipedia article, it’s a parody of the yanki delinquent manga of the 70s and 80s. I didn’t realize it was parodying a specific thing while watching, I just figured it was taking a few tropes and just satirizing them.)

  Like, I don’t have to have any prior knowledge to see that this guy is trying to be tough, and he’s got a lackey.

  

  And I keep using the word absurd because that’s what it’s doing. One classmate is a gorilla, which is neither explained, nor something the other characters can figure out. One classmate looks exactly like Freddie Mercury. This is commented on, and is as weird to the characters as it is to us.

  I watched the English dub, and it still holds up. And the episodes themselves each clock in around 10 minutes, so this 26-episode series was super easy to binge, and the dub is easily available on free-with-ads sites like Crunchyroll and RetroCrush. It was a very enjoyable distraction.

  Verdict

  English dub? Yes! And it’s totally worth it just for the first episode to hear the main character go “He. ate. my. pencil. HE ATE MY PENCIL!?!?”

  Visuals: About what you’d expect for 2004, but the art style is more detailed–adapting specific looks from the manga, I’d assume–that it was visually a breath of fresh air.

  Worth watching? Yes! It’s very silly, but it knows its being silly.

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• 

  R2R

  82/100
  "Dear Reader, This GaG Anime is funny"

  https://anilist.co/anime/114/Cromartie-High-School/

  ---

  Cromartie High School is just weird. I remember watching an episode one day just out of curiosity, and it dropped my jaw with that opening 'pencil' scene. The characters are as equally absurd. There's a guy whose hair (a Mohawk), for some reason, always flows in the air in ridiculous ways and the serious facial expressions that might remind you of old 80s & 90s character designs, there's a robot named "Mechazawa", a mute muscled-man named 'Freddie', a mascot character who's straight up a Gorilla, and the list goes on. The character archetypes alone can make enough comedy for 3 episodes.

  Each episode has somewhat of a setting, a somewhat of plot like riding a bus, saving a friend or just a bunch of daily life stuff like conquering the entire world, but the characters mix into this familiar setting and then destroys it with their own stupidity.
  What surprised me though, are how well animation & sound effects worked. The animation is actually lowkey terrible, there's very little movement; the characters just slide into the scene or suddenly cover the entire frame and the added sound effects just makes it look like normal thing when it feels so random & abnormal. One time, I really lost it when they randomly induced a helicopter sound effect when the Mohawk guy's hair suddenly started spinning, it's just so absurd & random that it cracks into funny shit.
  This Anime is a parody of 'Yanki' (Juvenile Delinquents) themed manga, that were the popular stuff in 1970s & 80s. Now I haven't read or watched old Yanki Anime but I still found it to be funny. If you just want to have a quick idea of how delinquent typed characters in those times made, I'd recommend Riding Bean which is just 50 minutes and the dub is available on YouTube. Cromartie High School is available on Crunchyroll (or so Google says). The opening & endings are ridiculous as expected, but I like the "Trust Me" ending song, the guitar at the beginning is so fun.

  Every episode lasts from 10 to 15 minutes which makes it easy to binge...except it didn't, for me atleast. I watched 8 episodes straight and the jokes became so painfully dull. Not saying they became 'unfunny', those ridiculous sound effects, out of the place faces & low level animation still works but the absurdity just grows on you and it starts to feel predictable, which lessens the comedic effect. Learning from that, I watched 2 episodes a day and it worked. I had this same problem with many gag Anime so it's probably just me but I do recommend watching it just an episode or two per day, as I recommend with all other gag Anime & Manga.

  ---

  Conclusion

  This is a funny GaG Anime that had probably been left in a time capsule and you might want to check it out.

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