Overview

It’s finally time to review Cromartie High School which was originally recommended to me back in February of this year by a fellow member of the Halo community.

Cromartie High School mainly follows Kamiyama and his friends in year one of Cro-High as it’s called. While most of the other students in the school are self-proclaimed “badasses,” Kamiyama is your typical, good-natured, anime protagonist who doesn’t belong there.

Each episode is only half-length, meaning that they’re about 12 minutes long rather than a full-length episode which would be around 24. This said, I wouldn’t call it a short because those tend to be five minutes or less.

While there are concepts which carry over between episodes, each one is largely a standalone event, or more commonly, multiple standalone events per episode. Because of how the series is structured as well as the length of each episode, it’s a good anime to pick up for an episode when you have some spare time.

Rather than trying to explain some of the hijinks that goes on in this anime, I think it would be more effective to simply move on to the characters section.

Characters

As stated earlier, Kamiyama is the protagonist of the series and one of the few characters who doesn’t really belong in Cro-High. However, in order to learn how he ended up going to school there, you’ll have to read the manga as the anime instructs.

Kamiyama adapts surprisingly well to life at Cro-High. Within the first episode or so he already establishes himself as “the most badass” year one student. He doesn’t do anything to earn this title other than existing in the same school as everyone else, because if you see a rabbit sitting with a bunch of lions, you think, “that must be one badass rabbit.”

While not the only student to actually use logical arguments, that’s one of Kamiyama’s strengths. Despite this, his “logical” arguments don’t always apply to what goes on at Cro-High.

Hayashida is Kamiyama’s best friend and sports a purple mohawk. He’s not the brightest of the bunch, but is loyal to Kamiyama ever since he was established as the “most badass” year one student. Hayashida is easily swayed by Kamiyama’s arguments.

Maeda is a blonde student who frequently tends to get kidnapped by rival school Des-High. Despite his frequent kidnappings, Maeda is probably the only real voice of reason at Cro-High and tends to attempt to reason with Kamiyama and Hayashida to no avail.

Takenouchi is the “boss” of Cro-High’s year one. While Kamiyama is the “most badass,” Takenouchi is considered to be the strongest and rules with an iron fist. However, despite his outward appearance, he has one major weakness, he gets motion sick easily.

Mechazawa is the first of three “students” at Cro-High who are a bit different from the rest. As you might infer from his name, Mechazawa is actually a robot, although none of the other students aside from Kamiyama and Hayashida appear to realize this (Maeda might, I forget).

Freddie Mercury is the next of these characters. While he is human, Kamiyama comments on how he’s unsure if he’s really enrolled as a Student in Cro-High. Freddie has no dialogue, never wears a shirt, and rides a giant horse to school.

The final of these three characters is Go, a literal Gorilla. Unlike with Freddie, whose enrollment status is questionable, Kamiyama is sure that Go isn’t actually a student at Cro-High. However, Go still seems to be considered part of the gang and hangs out at Maeda’s house with everyone else.

The final character I’ll mention is the only one who is explicitly not a student at Cro-High. Yamaguchi is the boss of year one at Des-High and therefore can be considered Des-High’s counterpart to Takenouchi of Cro-High.

Yamaguchi, despite being strong, really just wants to commit to his love of comedy. Due to this, he frequently lashes out physically at his subordinates who make bad jokes, which just makes them think he hates comedy since they don’t know his secret.

Conclusion

In the end I decided that Cromartie High School is a 6/10, however, as I’ve mentioned for other series, that doesn’t necessarily mean it was bad. I actually really enjoyed the series for what it was, but I still feel that I can’t rate it any higher despite the fact that I liked it.

I heard that Cromartie High School had similar comedy to my favorite anime of the current season, Hinamatsuri, and after watching it I’d have to agree. Both series implement deadpan humor effectively, although I still think I like Hinamatsuri more (full review coming once the season ends).

Even though I’ve only recently finished this series, I’ve already seen references to it in other anime since then. Specifically, episode three of Lucky Star, which I started just this weekend, referenced Cromartie.

I’ve probably seen references to it in the past, but simply didn’t notice. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Monogatari series referenced Cromartie at one point and I just happened to miss it because I wasn’t aware of what was being referenced at the time.

In the end there’s only one thing I might want to change about this anime. While I found the half-length episodes to be convenient at times, I still think I would have preferred them to be full-length.

I’m not saying the content in each episode needs to be expanded to double its current length, but they could have just combined episodes into pairs and it would have worked. I tended to watch this series at a rate of one episode per day, but if each episode was longer I still would have done this, but finished faster.