Well I had just finished watching Steins;gate for the first time recently (it's excellent by the way). Lo and behold I was wondering what to watch next, I felt like watching something funny and one of the programmes that kept on cropping up in my search for "funny animes" (out of the ones I haven't watched) was School Rumble. Looked it up on Anime News Network and at the bottom of the review it was comparing the show's sketch approach to Azumanga Daioh, which I had seen already, and an anime which I'd never heard of before called Cromartie High School. I thought I'd check out and see what School rumble was like by looking up a few videos on youtube, a lot of it seemed pretty funny (I've still yet to watch it properly), so then I went to check and see what Cromartie High School was like and my was I pleasantly surprised.
Cromartie High School...Don't mess with these badasses
Cromartie High School is like a testosterone fueled version of Azumanga Daioh...well maybe not totally since Azumanga Daioh is more sincere in it's themes but I still get a sense of the two being polar opposites on the same "what the fuck" magnet. I say that because Cromartie High School can really get you wondering "just what the hell am I watching" just as much as Azumanga Daioh does, if not even more.
Takashi Kamiyama the main character. check out the sketch lines as well, the animation is bad but it adds to the show's humour
CHS is about a school called Cromartie High School that consists of nothing but "Badass" delinquents, and 16 year old "not so delinquent" Takashi Kamiyama has just enrolled there. The series is pretty much a sort of slice-of-life anime that parodies something called "yankii" according to wikipedia which is "juvenile delinquent" manga apparently, though I don't know anything about that. The first thing you'll notice when watching this is the art style which has the characters drawn in a more realistic manner (in the same way to that found in yankii manga) in comparison to other large-eyed, massive head anime (that'll be 99.99999% of anime then) which is immensely refreshing. To add to this refreshment is a serving of really bad animation, but you've got to bear in mind that that's sort of the point and it makes it all the more hilarious.
Whilst my knowledge about Japanese perception of delinquent youths is limited to that shown on Japanorama and the film Battle Royale, I think it's still pretty easy to at least vaguely understand that the show is making fun of certain tough guy stereotypes and it does so brilliant by having all the characters being portrayed in a straight manner giving it a fantastic deadpan humour style that got me laughing my ass off. Whilst I may not get the more specific references (I would give an example but I don't know what they are) there's definitely enough to draw me into the show (I would say I'm averagely knowledgeable about anime). The Humour is really random and definitely not for everyone, to put it into perspective this show could easily be put onto adult swim, it's really difficult to describe in words. I guess you just have to go and see it for yourself to really understand what I'm talking about but the opening gives a pretty good gist of the show, as it should:
Azumanga Daioh: Not what I first thought it was
So lets go back to Azumanga Daioh which I first saw 2 or 3 years ago, it's a show which, initially, I was really apprehensive about watching due to the amount of cuteness it apparently had, but after watching the series I loved it. One of these reasons is the random hilarious content it has, the other reason being as mentioned before it is sincere in it's themes, to put it in another more melodramatic way it's got "heart". I tried to watch Lucky Star once and I just couldn't finish the first episode, it gave off this feeling of being cute for the sake of it, it's just "boring fan-service that doesn't appeal to me" and nothing else. Azumanga Daioh on the other hand inevitably has fan-service peppered throughout but it doesn't let that take anything away from the substance of the characters and what they're going through
So Cromartie lacks this "heart" but again it probably wouldn't work if it did have it, especially as A: it's a parody of something, and B: it could be said that the whole point of displaying delinquency is to not display "heart". In fact Azumanga and Cromartie are completely opposite in every way yet they both remind me of each other so much when watching them. I think that this has to do with two things: 1: they're both set in a school, and 2: they share a similar comedic form with their randomness, slice-of-life feel to them both.
Also both have certain characters that steal whatever scene they're in:
No comments:
Post a Comment