#271: Cromartie High School (2003-4)

 

Studio: Production I.G

Director: Hiroaki Sakurai

Based on a manga by Eiji Nonaka

Voice Cast: Takahiro Sakurai as Takashi Kamiyama, Norihisa Mori as Tabata/Takeshi Hokuto, Ryo Naitou as Yutaka Takenouchi, Takaya Kuroda as Masked Takenouchi, Takuma Suzuki as Shinjiro Hayashida, Tetsu Inada as Akira Maeda, Norio Wakamoto as Shinichi Mechazawa, Youto Kazama as Noboru Yamaguchi, Megumi Hayashibara as Maeda's Mother

Viewed in Japanese with English Subtitles

 

Cromartie High School was an early series in my interest in anime, one of the many ADV Films licenses brought over the United Kingdom. The origins of Cromartie, even before the first chapters were being published in the year 2000 by its creator Eiji Nonaka, comes from the Japanese "yankii" (juvenile delinquent) manga of the 1970s and 1980s. Cromartie High School, without all the music references and surreal tangents, is a deadpan parody which images these archetypes if they were dense, clueless and/or were hung up on the littlest details even when considering whether to go to a rival school and fight the yankii there.

Our introduction to this titular school is Takashi Kamiyama, who is not someone meant to be there, but with the first episode explicitly telling the audience the reason for ending up in there has to be read in the manga. Suffice to say, he is not the sort of student to end up in Cromartie, a place of ruffians and hooligans. He has at least some intelligence, where in a world of doofuses he will be King, the lamb sleeping among lions (and a gorilla) as Shinjiro Hayashida, a fellow student who befriends him, states. He is the most imposing figure and can become a) the strongest delinquent in the country in a competition, all because of knowing in a quiz yogurt is made with milk, b) will defend his title by hosting a quiz himself to confuse his challengers.

Before you get to the gorilla, Mechazawa the robot student or Freddie Mercury - yes, that Freddie Mercury - the joke is undeniably the idea of the sixteen year old rebel who wins fist fights, or is supposed to if fights ever were to break out in this series, like those Takashi Miike made Crow Zero 1 & 2 about between 2007 and 2009, when they do not live up to these expectations. This is done with both absurd touches but also their own idiosyncratic personalities. Most people may have motion sickness on transport which they live with, but imagining the head of the first years, an imposing figure named Yutaka Takenouchi, having to hide this to keep his toughness status, and looking so even when struggling, is inherently funny. The innocuous undercutting a trope is one of the funnier types of humour throughout anime, and Cromartie provides this in many ways which succeed. This is before the show is also proudly strange, such as providing an entire one-off episode, each less than twelve minutes each with opening and ending credits, about a wise gorilla sushi chef who helps mend the wounds between father and son with a banana sushi. Without highlights like that episode, which goes so hard with the premise that you have messages on the screen reminding viewers this was still Cromartie High School, some of the funnier jokes in a pure matter of fact tone involve adding the banal and ordinary to heightened anime tropes. These weird characters, alongside how magnificently dumb and charming they can be, have to contend with ordinary things a viewer has to put up with, like whether they have gotten off the right stop on a train, only with the bombast of their reactions to these events being these archetypes the combination which adds different layers to the gag.

Kamiyama's friends include Hayashida himself, whose purple Mohawk has a mind of its own and more secrets to it; there is Maeda, who puts up being the one dismissed and also frequently kidnapped by rival schools; Takeshi Hokuto, who is introduced attempting a coup to rule the school with his lackey, only known as Hokuto 's lackey and not able to say his real name aloud, only to realise he transferred to the wrong school; and more characters including a figure, later on, who is an older man in a mask who, attempting to hijack a plane in one episode when introduced, hides among the students whilst wearing the mask still. Gorilla the gorilla is literally a gorilla, and Freddy, literally based on Queen singer Freddie Mercury, based on an iconic concert costume with him shirtless wearing red suspenders, is as close as they could get away with. Freddie in this interpretation is more a big older man with a magnificent moustache, never talking and with even his friends wondering of what transpires in his mind. Then there is Mechazawa, played by Norio Wakamoto, a prolific voice actor who started in the late seventies and has a very distinct voice. Mechazawa is a literal robot, who does not realise he is one as a student, but does get rebooted like a PC, and does end up crashing a motorbike and ends up becoming one afterwards himself, allowing multiple parodies of Kamen Rider heroes if imagining what would happen, rightly, if the police arrested the driver for not having a motorcycle license.

Kamiyama, a lovable goof who yet has more smarts, is our centre but in the twenty six episodes, this show switches to other characters a lot, and this is always a good thing throughout, even when it comes of a pair of actors in a fictional comedy show in the world, Pootan, who are deadpan in the humour whilst wearing giant cuddly bear-like costumes with their faces visible. My favourite character is actually Noboru Yamaguchi, the leader of a rival school with a giant afro, whose real passion is as a connoisseur of comedy who wants to become a comedian. His stuff is hilarious even if you have no real knowledge on the intricacies of Japanese comedy, including the language barrier, whether debating in internal thoughts the structure of a punch line mid-meeting with his underlings, who are misinterpreting his behaviour, or assigning a ventriloquist as his second-in-command, which leads to the issue whether he or the puppet is actually given the position.

The cast is all male, with the one segment about an all-girls' school just redesigning your original cast as "princesses" and the voice actors not changing their vocals, a really good final episode gag especially as it clearly references the music video for Queen's I Want to Break Free even by accident at one point. There are some cameos with female actresses in the cast, but Cromartie, as a story about young male delinquents being goofballs, is an example for me to rediscover, in showing how talented the male voice actors in this series, from Takahiro Sakurai as Takashi Kamiyama to Tetsu Inada as Maeda, are. Surreal comedy anime has been a genre where I have seen how talented a lot of female voice actresses are for the medium, entirely because they have to turn on a dime in terms of the bizarre scenarios the writers and directors provide them, so Cromartie is just as rewarding in the Japanese dub to see this for male actors, the subdued reactions from many in this case adding more to the moments for how they bat off scenarios that, rightly for a viewer, would be ridiculous if they ever transpired. Even this becomes a joke, with some knowledge of voice actors, in that they hired Megumi Hayashibara. By that point she would have been a megastar in anime voice acting, most famous for many in the West for Rei in the Neon Genesis Evangelion franchise, but someone who would have been huge by that point for how many roles in leads and main cast in anime in the nineties, also a prolific singer and musician who would be heard singing the opening and ending themes for many titles she worked on like the Slayers franchise. They cast her, in a cameo, as Medea's mother, who only makes one sound; if you get that they choose such a prolific actress for just making a single noise, and probably how expensive that would have been to cast her, unless she did it as a favour or thought was hilarious, it is funny and one case, for a show which is mostly able to be gotten for its humour without context, able to even add little in-jokes to anime in itself once in a while for an additional layer.

Many moments in this, some of the funniest, are about taking strange and elaborate tangents within an idea. Many times, the joke begins with Kamiyama and the cast debating the logic of a scenario, with layers suddenly being added to jokes that would be funny in another show already, such as Maeda trying to imaging himself as a cat for a week, to the point of wearing cat's eats, when Kamiyama argues no human being really knows how to fully communicate to a cat, even when it comes to petting them. Even with some cultural differences to consider, such as the references and debates to Japanese stand-up comedy tropes, a most of this works without the context needed because it is entirely about characters over thinking scenarios and/or being idiots. Some jokes are just punch lines to pure weirdness, like the only logical reason a train announcer would require a green grocer and a sumo wrestler to help in one of the carts.

It is a series that could have continued, ending without a dramatic climax or a tearful send off, but it manages to be consistent, feeling right when it closed out without any moment it stumbled, with no weak episodes or having petered out. I roared a few times, chuckles or snorted many times, and ultimately the best take to describe why you should watch Cromartie High School is that this fully succeeds as a comedy on a gut level.