Sakigake!! Cromartie Koukou

Takashi Kamiyama is your typical mild-mannered high school student—polite, aloof, and pacifistic, with a slightly above-average IQ. But would your average high school student really enroll himself at the infamous Cromartie High School, known as a breeding ground for the toughest delinquents out there?

Apparently so, as that is exactly what Takashi does, though for reasons he'd rather leave unmentioned. However, one thing is for sure: the "hard-boiled rabbit in a den full of hungry lions" is never going to have another dull day. And how could he, now that he's surrounded by mohawked punks, obnoxious robots, and... gorillas? And was that Freddie Mercury riding a horse down the corridor? Follow Takashi as he earnestly dedicates his new high school life to better his school's reputation while his classmates are hellbent on wreaking havoc.

[Written by MAL Rewrite]

Freddie Main

Mechazawa, Shinichi Main

Wakamoto, Norio Japanese

Kamiyama, Takashi Main

Sakurai, Takahiro Japanese

Hayashida, Shinjirou Main

Suzuki, Takuma Japanese

Maeda, Akira Main

Inada, Tetsu Japanese

Di Gi Charat ing

Sanada, Asami Japanese

Yamaguchi, Noboru ing

Kazama, Yuuto Japanese

Takenouchi, Yutaka ing

Naitou, Ryou Japanese

Go, Hiromi ing

Mechazawa, Beta ing

Kanai, Mika Japanese

Kobayashi, Noriko Producer

Nishizawa, Masatomo Producer

Sakurai, Hiroaki Director, Storyboard

Moriwaki, Makoto Episode Director

Reviews

Aug 16, 2007

lowell

Recommended

In a word? HILARIOUS.

Each episode is only, like, 12 minutes long... and the whole series is incredibly worth it... if you've ever seen anything that has a "delinquent" in it (i.e. anyone with a hairstyle like John Travolta in Grease ;) ) or even if you haven't... this was just so surprisingly funny that it became almost an instant favorite.

...Am I hyping it up too much?

The first episode, I kind of chuckled/smiled a few times... and then as the series goes on, I found myself just dying of laughter. It's incredibly clever and witty...

The show follows a bunch of hoodlums in their ... and their ...non-traditional concerns. One badass boss has severe problems with motion sickness, another is a comedy snob, and well... one's a robot. It's wacky in the best way -- a little light on plot but heavy on the funny. It kind of reminds me of The Tick (the animated series, not the live action) in the way that it's kind of campy and over the top and oh-so-original.

The show does such a good job of turning the typical delinquent devices on their heads. It starts off like something that seems familiar... something that feels normal for the genre... and all of a sudden it's like you're in bizarro-land and this hilarious joke comes out of nowhere. And it's even more surprising and even funnier because you know they knew you were expecting the generic follow-through and they gave you a spoonful of crazy instead. (Does that make sense?) ...It's like watching a pitcher in baseball go through a windup, but at the very last second, instead of pitching the ball to you, his feet turn into ducks.

It's like that... only funny. ;) Really, really funny.

Reviewer’s Rating: 10

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Jan 9, 2018

SeaOfRed

Mixed Feelings

This one's a bit of a hit or miss.
You'll either really love it and think its the greatest comedy ever, or it'll kinda just make you smile sometimes. My experience falls into the latter. That being said I have developed a fondness for this show through a sort of self imposed Stockholm syndrome. I finished this because someone I respect really likes this show and I wanted to like it too.

Overall you'll know if you like it after 3 episodes.
Most people like it. But from what I've heard if you like it you will LOVE it.
Its worth checking out.
I'd give it a 6. (which ... is a better than average score)

REDUNDANT SHIT:
Animation is garbage but only for the sake of enhancing the comedy

Characters are jokes

Story is episodic

Sound is the same as the animation
(its worth mentioning the OP and ED are great.)

And like I said enjoyment is entirely dependent on your taste in comedy.
Good luck.

Reviewer’s Rating: 6

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Dec 10, 2009

Uriel1988

Not Recommended

Usually the words 'Comedy anime' invoke in me images of immensely overdone slapstick, cheesy running gags repeated ad nauseum, annoying catchprases and all kinds of accidental groping of voluptuous teenage girls. Given how frequently said tropes appear in a lot of comedy anime and the rather disturbing amount of them it comes as no surprise that I don't consider them one of my favorite genres.
'Cromartie High School' (which will be referred to as 'CHS' for the rest of the review) can be faulted a lot of things; but it's certainly a whole different beast from the things I described earlier on. Cromartie isn't about ... fluffy cute girls and awkward young men; but about manly high schoolers who assert themselves as proudly as possible.

The series is mostly set in and around a rather special high school called Cromartie (surprising, huh?), and by 'special' I mean that EVERY SINGLE STUDENT ATTENDING IT IS A DELINQUENT. Yep, you read that right. At the center of it all is newcomer Takashi Kamiyama who is trying his best to survive in an environment filled with agressive thugs, robots, a gorilla, and a mute who resembles Freddie Mercury.

Think that sounds absurd? Well absurdity (correction: MANLY absurdity) is the name of the game in CHS. Each of its 26 episodes is a 10-minute barrage of absurdity. Most of them star out on a fairly normal note (e.g.: a certain character wants to go somewhere) but events usually take a turn for the strange fairly quickly as characters think and act in such incredibly skewed ways that it makes you wonder how they ever get anything done.

Therein lies the biggest problem with CHS: it's simply too fascinated with being quirky and bizarre. None of the characters have any personality to them aside from a single quirk that's used to get them or those around them in trouble, a lot of situations situations are simply too absurd to be funny (especially since there's no real context) and the whole affair ends up feeling rather predictable when you realize that a character's wish to eat an ice cream will end up in him doing anything but that. The biggest irony here is that the series eventually becomes predictable simply because it always tries so hard to be surprising and off-beat.

There's not much in the audiovisual department either. The character-design's aren't very detailed and the animation is rather bad. I've been told that this is because the series is throwback to a so-called 'delinquent' subgenre where the quality of the animation was always poor and I have no trouble believing this seeing as the production studio at hand (Production I.G.) has produced several anime-series that are among the most visually stunning the medium has to offer. Fact is that animation, deliberate as it may be, is unattractive to look at and fails to give an otherwise dull series a tiny bit of redeeming value. Background music is also nothing to write home about and seeing as I don't speak Japanese I can't really judge the quality of the voice acting but I do find Takahiro Sakurai and Norio Wakamoto pleasant to listen to at all times, that's something at least.

Ultimately I feel that CHS' hook isn't interesting enough to captivate for 26 episodes. None of the episodes aside from one downright hilarious scene that makes fun of internet trolls made me laugh out loud. Making me crack a smile was the best it could manage aside from the aforementioned bit about internet trolls). Manliness be damned.

Reviewer’s Rating: 4

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