'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.
