After having read the manga Crows a while back, I got a new appreciation of the Juvenile Delinquent manga, so when a Juvenile Delinquent anime, Wind Breaker, showed up in the Spring 2024 anime list, I figured I should give it a try. It didn’t have the same degree of character depth as Crows, but I still found it to be an enjoyable show.
Wind Breaker follows Haruka Sakura, a guy with a girly name, naturally two-tone hair, and heterochromia. With the Japanese High School system’s (and honestly Japanese society in general’s) focus on conformity at all costs – this lead to him receiving heavy bullying from his peers and from adults, combined with victim blaming at his past schools. This led to him becoming an prickly delinquent, and ultimately choosing to go to Furin High School – a school run by delinquents – believing that it’s the only place he could make his own. However, on arriving, he discovered that the delinquents of Furin – known as Bofurin – are considered as the town’s defenders and are accepted and embraced by the people – and he ends up not getting judged based on his hair, eyes, or name, allowing him to slowly mellow out some. However, some of the other gangs in town are less benevolent than Bofurin, leading to clashes – so while he and his classmates are still going to have to fight to protect their new home.
At 12 episodes, Wind Breaker doesn’t have much time to develop our characters and provide some growth, outside of Sakura slowly relaxing his prickly demeanor throughout the season. We do get some development – particularly involving a couple of the antagonists of this season – but it’s still somewhat limited. This is made up for by using the fights to provide some of that development.
Oh, and those fights? They’re exquisite. I haven’t seen much in terms of action anime from Cloverworks – they’ve worked on action series, like Darling in the FranXX and Spy X Family, but on both of those other studios, like A-1 Pictures and Wit Studios, were taking point. The series they’d taken lead on previously that I mentally associate them with were series like My Dress-Up Darling and Bocchi The Rock. Both are series with really well-animated detail work, but not for fight scenes.
Here they put together some exquisitely done fight scenes with wonderful choreography, stupendously fluid movement, and great framing. We get a scene in the last episode of the season that has the kind of mix-of-CG-and-hand-drawn-oner involving a chase down a high school stairwell that GoHands constantly tries to do and fails, but CloverWorks nails. The big arc of this season is a series of fights on a stage in a disused theater that all look great, and which really helps to develop each of our protagonists with how they fight.
The series has been picked up for a second season, which is great, because I think this is probably one of the best fighting anime of the past few years – and I say this with My Hero Academia’s adaptation of the big final arc airing as this post goes live. I went into this series cautiously optimistic, and came out of it thrilled and eagerly anticipating that second season.
Wind Breaker is currently available for streaming on Crunchyroll.
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