What happens when you take a former Hello! Project trainee, a former member of Momoiro Clover Z, and a bunch of members of PASSPO and make a film about them? Well, here you go! This is a very interesting lineup but I think it's oddly appropriate in some inexplicable way.
The main thing to mention here is, of the central cast of 11, Hayami Akari is the only actress of them. Given that this film was produced, at least in part, by Universal Music, I'd say this mish-mash of idol/former-idol talent has something to do with that. Despite this, however, the acting isn't as wonky or amateur as one might expect. While I first came to this film, years ago, for Akari because her performances are usually great no matter what she's in, I also stayed for You Kikkawa. Kikkawa surprised me with her acting in this film as she has had little to no documented experience acting, that I can find, either prior to the making of this film, or since. It's pretty incredible what she manages to pull off in this starring role. The way she interacts with Akari on screen, as well, make for some of the most charming scenes any film of this kind can offer.
Cheerfu11y, once again, is a film that follows the popular kind of story where a loose group of friends/constituents are forced into a situation where they have to work together to achieve a common goal. In Cheerfu11y's case, that is winning a cheer dancing competition to pay for a statue that they all broke during a contested and gridlocked discussion about the allocation of school funding to their respective clubs.
Upon revisiting this film after years of having left it alone, I've managed to deduce Cheerfu11y's strongest points down to two things: The family dynamic and the relationship between You Kikkawa and Hayami Akari's characters. Kikkawa's character's family is dysfunctional and only gets more complicated as the film goes on and all of the scenes between herself, her sister and their mother are all exceptionally written, blocked, shot, edited, and acted. They add a lot of tension to the film and, if the film's focus was moved away from the competition and training aspect of the story and was more about this girl's home life, I think it would be a much more interesting film. Where those family scenes add tension to the story, Akari's character comes in to lighten the mood. She's not comic relief in the traditional sense, but her interactions with Kikkawa's character are so lighthearted and cute that it helps serve as a nice relief.
The weakest part of Cheerfu11y has to be the actual training and competition aspect of the story - what's supposed to be the focal point. The buildup is fine, and even the beginning of training starts out well enough, but the film ends up going through so many different subplots that it starts to cannibalize time that would have otherwise been spent on developing the 9 other girls in the group and their interpersonal dynamics within the group. There are a couple of stronger personalities but we don't see them often enough to really remember what they are like. Some supporting characters seem to be introduced and insisted to be important only to dissolve into the background with the rest of the girls soon later, never to really be heard from again, save for the ending, which I will get to. By its midsection, Cheerfu11y seems to lose focus and relegates the training, hard work, and teamwork to a montage so it can finally get to its conclusion.
One of the tings about this film that I'm not too keen on either is its reliance on narration. The narration is told by Akari's character which makes sense, considering that she's the one drawing the manga based on this story. The problem is that the narration is very prevalent in the first act of the film and then disappears entirely for the rest of the film until the very end. I understand what the point of it was, but it seemed a bit odd at the same time. The way the film is framed in the beginning, it's made out to almost be like Akari's character is the main character and we get a lot of the first act told in her narration from her perspective - even hearing her own thoughts in some cases. But then the film, not so much shifts, but almost treats Akari's character as a red herring of sorts where she really isn't the main character, and as she becomes almost as equally background dressing as the other supporting cast, the narration and the knowledge of what she's thinking also disappear. They don't disappear entirely, but they are never as prominent again in the rest of the film as they are in the first act. I also felt that the narration was used as a tool to justify organically establishing all 11 girls in the group by assigning them certain specific skills, interests and personality archetypes. Something tells me that, perhaps that was something of an 11th hour decision made after the film was finished, but that's speculation.
Another issue with this film is at the end where all 11 girls, essentially, tell the audience what their character arc in this story was, despite knowing very little about them and what, specifically about this experience helped them grow or change. One-by-one they give a short speech about how great an experience it was to work to this point with the rest and how it transformed them, but we don't really see that, save for a couple of characters.having a single moment or two with another character, but in the end it does not feel earned. More could have been done with this ensemble cast but it seems that it was decided that they weren't going to do that.
Cheerfu11y is complicated for me. It was among the first Japanese films I've ever seen and there is a lot of nostalgia behind it. I was surprised just how much more receptive I was to the family scenes than I was when I first saw it years ago, and now I believe that those scenes are the best parts of the film, coupled with the scenes that have You Kikkawa and Hayami Akari interacting. But at the same time, the film suffers because so much emphasis is put on those strong aspects at the expense of the whole point of the film, so it's a bit of a paradox. I still enjoy this film and I would recommend it to anyone who might find this, lesser-Swing Girls with cheer dancing concept interesting. It's nothing offensive and it isn't boring, but it's unfocused and could have been polished a bit more before shooting.
