Let's Go, Jets!

When Hikari starts high school she joins the cheer dance club for one reason only, to support a boy she has known since junior high. But the teacher running the club, Kaoruko, does not take a joke, and on the first day she announces the target: they are going to win in America. The rest of the film is the long haul of a crowd of small-town girls training their way towards that. Hayato Kawai keeps it as an unshowy sports comedy, more interested in strangers becoming a team than in the moment of winning. The story is real: the JETS, a cheer dance squad from a high school in Fukui, won an international competition in the United States in 2009 and took the trophy repeatedly in the years after. Suzu Hirose and Yuki Amami lead.