Anime Review: Cromartie High School

In our small burg, we have a Blockbuster Video store. That store has a somewhat limited Anime selection. As an avid anime fan who doesn not have access to the Anime Channel via my satellite TV service, I've made my way through everything the local video store had to offer. One of the most recent discoveries in their anime aisle was Sakigake!! Cromartie High School. This 24-episode series (each episode is about 10 minutes long), is funny beyond funny.

You’d probably have to look a long time before finding someone who speaks really highly of their high school. But there are crummy high schools, and then there’s Cromartie High. It’s a real slap in the face to the well-behaved, straight-A student Takashi Kamiyama when he finds himself, through a cruel twist of fate, enrolled at Cromartie. At the next desk over is a surly brute who eats the contents of Takashi’s pencil case. Partly to freak Takashi out, of course—but mostly because pencils are his favourite snack! But that menace is among the more normal of Takashi’s classmates, if the word "normal" even applies at Cromartie. Sneering thugs with mohawks are everywhere, but they’re nothing compared to the likes of Mechazawa, an overgrown coffee tin of a robot who’s as rude and obnoxious and any flesh and blood student. Then there’s Gorilla—they don’t call him that because he’s big, dumb and smells bad, though he is and does. No, he actually is a gorilla. That’s Cromartie High School for you—like a zoo crossed with a nuthouse, minus the cleanliness and sanity!


Each episode of Cromartie High School is chock-full of imagry so absurd as to make you laugh out loud and to quickly scan the TV screen each time the scene changes to see what new strange elements have been added. The storyline is straightforward at first - as is described above. The overwhelming theme of the series revolves around the heirarchy of the tough kids at the school. One tough, Takeshi Hokudo, a rich kid with aspirations of world domination, transfers to Cromartie to control the toughs there, thinking his father is chairman of the school's board of directors. He finds out too late that Cromartie is a public school, there is no board of directors, and he isn't even wearing the proper school uniform... You get the idea.

Field trips gone awry, continuous talk of fights with other high schools (that never come to fruition), alien abductions, general slackery, plus a character who bears a too-close resemblance to Freddie Mercury from the rock band Queen and an all-too infectious theme song - Cromartie High School is not for most folks, but it's found a deep spot in my funny bone.