Fantasia 2025 Review: HONEKO AKABANE'S BODYGUARDS, This High School Action Comedy Is A Blast

Iruki Arakuni is charged with protecting his childhood friend who doesn’t know there’s a ten-million-dollar bounty on her head in Ishikawa Jun'ichi’s manga adaptation, Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards, making its North American Premiere at Fantasia 2025 this week.

Honeko Akabane (Deguchi Natsuki) is a regular teenage girl at Sosoji High School, she wants to study law when she goes to college and she’s practicing hard for the upcoming dance competition. Iruki Arakuni (Raul Murakami) is an old childhood friend who just transferred to Sosoji High, he reconnects with Honeko immediately and their friendship is rekindled. What Honeko doesn’t know is that Iruki has been hired by her secret father, Mr. Jingu (Ken'ichi Endô), to protect her against assassins eager to claim the huge bounty on her head.

It turns out that Mr. Jingu is the head of a national secret service and he’s been cracking down on organized crime in a big way. As retaliation, Japan’s criminal elements are determined to send a message, but Mr. Jingu is going to be ready for them. After the first attempt on Honeko’s is thwarted by Iruki, he learns that he’s not alone, Jingu has hired his entire high school class as bodyguards.

He’s now a member of a group of twenty-two specialists whose abilities range from swordplay (definitely useful), to ninja skills (or course), to less obvious things like gambling (okay, that’s kind of like crime), to streaming (okay, you lost me). Together, under the leadership of nerdy commander Sumihiko Somejima (Daiken Okudaira), they are determined to keep Honeko safe while also never letting on that she’s in any danger at all so she can live a regular life.

As the assassination attempts get more and more elaborate, so do the ruses concocted by Iruki’s classmates to simultaneously shut them down and maintain a sense of normalcy for Honeko. Director Ishikawa manages to juggle the comedic tone with genuine threat and some pretty entertaining action sequences quite well, keeping the film light and breezy while also managing to give the audience a few genuine thrills.

A sort of comedic take on Japan’s juvenile delinquent action genre, Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards stops well short of parody, though some of its visual inventions flirt with that line heavily. An introductory sequence in which the team of bodyguards is introduced plays out like a mix between the manga and video game intros where each character and their unique ability is stylistically splashed across the screen.

The action itself is both well executed and plentiful, which brings an additional level of excitement to a film that is surprisingly successful in juggling a number of different genres and tones. Though this type of action comedy isn’t unfamiliar territory for Japanese youth films – one need look no for further than the recent runaway success of the Baby Assassins franchise – it still manages to feel fresh when done right.

Though the manga influence is certainly front and center, Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards never feels like a cartoon. There are genuine emotional moments snuck in between the myriad gags, action sequences, and twists; and while the film never sits in them long enough to become maudlin, it does add a layer of empathy that helps keep the audience engaged on a slightly deeper level.

Intricately designed and directed, Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards is a blistering action comedy that never takes itself too seriously. Deguchi Natsuki’s performance in the lead gives him an opportunity to take on a number of different tones all at the same time, and he handles them all with aplomb. Though the action never quite approaches the visceral punch of something like Baby Assassins, it’s not really meant to, what it does intend is to deliver creative set pieces with solid pay offs, and it does that very well. One of the most straight up fun films of this year’s fest, Honeko Akabane’s Bodyguards is a delight for action fans seeking smiles.