Manga adaptation by Cloverworks
Streaming on Crunchyroll – Simulcast Pending

Premise

Haruka Sakura has moved to a new town to try and escape the bullying he used to receive over his appearance. Although he’s joined a school notorious for its problems with delinquency, he finds out that the students have actually banded together to form a gang which protects the town.

Zigg’s verdict: Not Enough Gas

OK I’ll try and keep the juvenile jokes to a minimum, I promise.

Wind Breaker kind of reminded me a lot of Ayaka from a few seasons ago, in that it’s a production where all the individual parts range from competent-to-good and yet the entire thing seems suffused with a sense of generic blandness. Oh and also in the sense that as it goes on you gradually realise that it’s a stealth ikemen show, a story that doubles as a delivery method for a series of hot boys who each have a singular quirk or personality trait as a charm point. Seriously, by the time the play the ED I was just hearing that Ouran scene in my mind.

To elaborate a little, there are a number of narrative points here which, while hardly original, are more than sufficient to build a decent story off of. The problem is the show seems unable to break out of strict genre tropes to make them work as effectively as they could. So, for example, let’s take Haruka’s trouble past as a boy bullied for his unusual appearance. This is a classic way to set up an isolated hero, and can be very effective when done well, particularly within the notoriously pressured-to-conform environment of the Japanese school system. But Wind Breaker can’t bring itself to show our hero as anything less than a badass, so his physical ‘deformity’ is xtreme cool anime hair and eyes, his emotional torment is all tortured teen cliches rather than genuine emotional vulnerability, and he’s still a super fighter able to effortlessly beat up the street toughs he encounters.

While we were watching Iro made the insightful comment that the setup here is honestly not too different from the opening of My Hero Academia, and it’s an illustrative comparison to make. The reason that episode succeeds where this doesn’t is that it’s much more emotionally honest, because it allows its hero to be weak and then portrays him overcoming that weakness through his basic goodness. We see Deku as a fully rounded character, both his pain and inadequacy but also the qualities which make him lovable and heroic, and we cheer because we see those positive aspects of his character outweigh the trials he’s put up against. In contrast, Haruka starts this episode as a kind of asshole who we’re told is in great pain, but never shows it or is really ever in trouble because to show weakness would be to ding his iceman personality, and the net result is he just comes off as boring and unlikable.

The only other notable thing about Wind Breaker is the unusually high production value – this is a Cloverworks show and features some good examples of the studio’s trademark excellent character animation work. The big fight that takes up the last third of the episode has some really nice individual cuts of animation, but they also feel lacking in impact, almost disconnected from the scene itself, more like a demo reel than actually telling a story. This extends to the visual presentation as a whole actually, which doesn’t really do much to generate atmosphere – just as an example, we’re told the town is under constant attack by criminals, and are occasionally shown closeups of extensive graffiti, but everywhere else the town looks like the comically perfect suburbia you get in every anime, all clean pavements and charming cafes.

It’s that kind of lack of care which formed my overwhelming impression of episode 1 of Wind Breaker. This is by no means a bad show on this evidence, and I’m sure it’ll hit the spot for many people, but personally I need a little more inspiration, or at least the hope of it, to keep me tuning in.