Asahinagu is a high school sports movie focusing on the obscure elegant form of traditional spear play - Naginata. It's almost like Kendo, except less aggressive and more elegant, and has another part of the body that when attacked, will award the attacker a point. The movie failed to impress me in most of the areas aforementioned, leaving me disappointed even a whole day after finishing it.

I'll be honest, I picked this show because of the cute lead - Nishino Nanase. Which is good and all, a cute lead playing the role of a rookie getting strong, finding out more about her own strengths and weaknesses. However, this was shown very superficially, and her overall character development was weak, let alone the other characters. As for their acting skills, only the other lead, Shiraishi Mai, and coach, Eguchi Noriko, did well in playing their roles.

The motivation for most of the scenes are lacking and the cohesion between them are not as smooth as most other successful high school sports shows like Chihayafuru or March comes in like a Lion. I believe that if this were spread out over a few movies, there might be the chance that it could've been at the very least decent to watch. Attempting to cram a story about personal and team growth within 2 hours is never going to work. Period.

It is a waste, in my opinion. These girls are idols and this is a platform for them to step into the movie business, but they were given such a bad script to follow. Oh how we have lost such a good chance for cute girls to shine. Oh woe is us.

(Out of all the bad things this movie has, there was just 1 good thing I gained out of it - Ito Marika is cute. God damn cute.)