Customer Reviews

Cromartie High - The Movie

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This movie is hilarious. I watched it without having read the manga or seeing the anime first, and I ended up laughing a lot. Cromartie High in any format is just incredibly funny, and this movie lives up to the manga extremely well. I don't know what kind of humor you'd classify it as, but it's great.

To put it shortly, the main characters, Kamiyama, transfers into Cromartie High to be with his friend (Tak Sakaguchi), who fails the entrance exam. Kamiyama is left alone to deal with this crazy school which is filled with some of the worst teenage thugs in Japan. But not only does it have thugs, it has a gorilla, a robot who doesn't know he's a robot, and a shirtless guy named "Freddie" who walks around wearing leather pants and sometimes rides a horse. The movie does have a sort of semi-continuous story, but it's also got a lot of elements from the manga, such as Takenuchi's motion-sickness adventure.

If you're a fan of Cromartie High, you must have this. If you're not, you should give it a try anyway.

Although I rarely watch anime now, from time to time there is a series that catches my interest, not so much because of an intricate plot or stunning animation, but because it possesses a bizarre sense of humor that I have yet to encounter. One such series is Azuma Kiyohiko's Azumanga Daioh and another is Nonaka Eiji's surreal Cromartie High School. Sporting the name of American baseball player Warren Cromartie, who made quite a splash in Japanese professional baseball from 1984-1990 for the Yomiuri Giants, Cromartie High School centers around a student named Kamiyama Takashi whose straight-laced nature puts him quite at odds with his classmates who resemble more a bunch of yakuza than high school students. But there's much more. Besides yakuza in training, other "students" include a robot who does not know he is a robot, a gorilla, and a fellow who resembles Freddie Mercury of Queen fame. Any description would not do the series justice, but the animated form serves it fell and slight shifts that would be too blunt in live action films come off flawlessly. However, as with a number of other popular manga/anime series, a live action movie was produced of Cromartie High School.

Episodic in nature, many sections from the Cromartie High School film are lifted directly from the anime/manga, of course, so those familiar with those versions of the series will be treated to seeing them performed with real actors, so the audience will be treated to seeing such scenes as Takenouchi suffering from motion sickness on a plane and Yamaguchi Noboru's detestation of the Putan show once again. However, while such scenes work well for animation, it fails pretty hard in live action. Also, the randomness of the film is not very enjoyable because 85 minutes is just too long for a type of humor that works best in 15 minute segments.

Cromartie High School is definitely a film made for those familiar with the anime/manga, because those uninitiated into the bizarreness of this series might be left scratching their heads. Funny at times, but mostly dull and stale, Cromartie High School the movie is one that can be skipped by those familiar with its earlier formats and those who are not.

The trouble with making movies based on TV series is that there has to be a strong central plot in a movie that also justifies any duplication of what took place in the TV series, be it live-action or animated. But if the central plot is weak enough and only for the sake of having the skits based on the TV series as highlights, then the movie fails.

Cromartie High School, based on the manga by Nonaka Eiji, avoids much of that. It parallels the original story, being about a normal student, Kamiyama Takeshi, who was smart enough to apply to any high school, but went to Cromartie because he wanted to be with friend of his who defended him from punks. Trouble was, his friend was so lacking in the brain department, he failed, leaving Kamiyama amidst a jungle of rowdy students who fight, smoke, and are sans clothes; in a scene that duplicates the manga, a tough named Masa eats an entire stack of pencils Kamiyama spills on his desk.

There are some variations from the manga and anime. Hayashida, he with the wild pink Mohawk hairdo in the original, instead is seen with a kind of ponytail. He is also portrayed as someone who is repeatedly late for class and who is so dumb that his math book is titled "Subtraction for Sillies." And the portrayal of Freddy isn't too much like Freddie Mercury per the manga. OK, he doesn't say a word per the manga Freddie, but a few bouts of singing would've helped. Obviously, Mechazawa, the simplistically designed cylindrical robot with red T-shirt with the characters "konjou" or "guts" is duplicated well enough.

Then there's long-haired preppy-looking Hokuto Takeshi of the Hokuto conglomerate. He wears a white elite high school uniform, clueless that CHS is a municipal school, and proclaims himself student leader. He tries to wriggle out of his dilemma by telling outlandish stories of trying to overthrow his father, the shadow prime minister. Guess what? Kamiyama, Hayashida, Freddy, and the gorilla join him, and they form the Earth Defense Forces, marching through town in khaki uniforms as heroes of justice.

And when Cromartie's toughest thug, Yutaka Takenouchi, gets involved with two hijackers, he is stranded somewhere in South America, captured by a primitive tribe, and set out to be the husband of a b^tt-ugly native woman who looks like Ronnie Corbett from the Two Ronnies, even down to the glasses. His replacement is one of the hijackers, who wears a ski-mask, but the students are too dumb to know that he's an imposter, so he is accepted as Mask de Takenouchi.

The central plot involves the arrival of gorilla-like aliens, Gori and Lla (get it?) who are a nod to the cheesy Japanese sci-fi shows or movies of the 60's and 70's, who want to take over the earth, and do so by enslaving the delinquents. Before long, the shirtless delinquents are sporting antennae headbands and doing exercises and routines that obviously parody the Shaolin kung-fu films.

As for real laughs, there is an Exorcist parody involving Mechazawa who pukes green and even emits the profanities uttered by Linda Blair, as well as the brightly lit doorway scene. And the part where Kamiyama tries to educate his classmates on the dangers of smoking is a highlight, at the expense of Masa and Mechazawa. It shows how delinquents think smoking is cool, but they need something to do with their hands.

Some scenes are duplicated but fail due to the real-life portrayal. The scene of the show Pootan, the surreal comedy of two guys dressed in plush suits, and Noboru Yamaguchi, the Afro-ed punk who tries to figure out why Pootan is popular, seems pointless due to lacking real oomph.

Takamasa Suga is the heart of this movie as the straight-laced Kamiyama, and does a bang-up portrayal of the manga and anime counterpart. Kaneko Noburu as Hokuto does the manga Hokuto pretty good. It helps if you've seen the anime or read the manga, but if not, it might catch you in a silly frame of mind.

After watching Yûdai Yamaguchi's opus Battlefield Baseball I was convinced his follow up Cromartie High would be hilarious. I was wrong.

It has all the right elements: the highest gorilla enrollment rate of any high school, a punk robot who smokes, and a shirtless tough guy named Freddie, but nothing comes together. The comic timing is completely off. Even the movie's few good jokes are ruined by never letting them play out, or cutting to an entirely new plot line. Every five minutes introduces a new plot line that's never resolved, or a new character that doesn't do anything. Half the movie is tedious narrating about how the main character wants to change the high school, or several minute long scenes of characters dicking around in class. Even the final fight between the alien gorillas and the rebel army falls flat on its face by cutting to a boring TV show of two people talking about nothing in costumes while someone tries to figure out why the TV show is popular.

Do yourself a favor and get Battlefield Baseball instead.