The opening scene of the Chihayafuru film embodies something utterly fundamental to karuta as a sport: the constant, thrilling sense of tense anticipation. Karuta is not a game of continuous action. Its energy and appeal build up over strained moments of anticipation, waiting for the next card to be called. Karuta embodies the thrill of the silence just before a decisive play in any sport; the ball aloft, players’ eyes trained, all voices hushed as victory and defeat hang in the balance. Karuta bottles that thrill, and unleashes it again and again, as its contenders rush for glory on the tatami mat.

I was happy to see this film so immediately attuned to what makes karuta, and Chihayafuru by extension, so thrilling. The ostentatious use of slow motion, the close focus on eyes and hands, the building piano melody – all of those variables contributed to a sequence that perfectly encapsulated karuta’s most exciting moments. That said, it is extremely friggin’ hard to make a sport like karuta either viscerally or tactically appealing over a long stretch of time, and even harder in live action than with the heightened compositional control and specificity of animation. When you combine that with Chihayafuru’s generally rambling narrative and slow-burning arcs, you end up with a manga that doesn’t really lend itself to live action adaptation. Fortunately, this film knows just what to cut and keep in order to keep Chihayafuru’s thrill alive.

The film actually seems to benefit from the fact that the original manga is a somewhat messily composed narrative – or at least, it seems to understand the narrative needs of its own medium quite well, and is perfectly willing to be ruthless in terms of its adaptation. I actually felt myself feeling validated in my own feelings on the anime production, through seeing how this film cut and rearranged in order to make a more satisfying film. Fans of original works often pray for “loyalty to the source material” in adaptations, but different mediums have different needs, and truly loyal adaptations tend to be boring, clumsy things. By rearranging narrative beats and sanding off odd digressions, Chihayafuru Part One is able to capture its source material’s heart without tripping over that source material’s vestigial organs.

To be fair to the manga, it’s much easier to naturally balance a narrative’s component ingredients when you know its overall shape. Things like Chihaya’s childhood relationship with Taichi and Arata, the current specter of romance between them, the various key opponents they face over time – all of these components are like elements in a musical composition, and when you’re actively playing a composition while also writing it, you’re somewhat bound by all of your prior decisions. And then, when someone else comes over to poke at your finished piece, they have the benefit of hindsight and perspective. Of course you should have introduced this thread earlier and reprised it consistently throughout; it’s the backbone of the whole piece!

All that might seem a little too metaphorical to really parse, so let’s actually break down how the film accomplishes this. First off, instead of frontloading the film with a lengthy flashback covering the entire childhood friendship of Chihaya, Arata, and Taichi, the film lightly sprinkles these flashbacks throughout. Because of this, their early friendship doesn’t feel like an ancient monolith we’re getting further and further away from; it feels like an active component of their lives, full of crucial moments whose relevance to their ongoing stories is immediately apparent. On top of this, the film is able to use the sequence of Taichi stealing Arata’s glasses as a running commentary on Taichi’s insecurity, his relationship with Arata, and his difficulty winning 1-on-1 showdowns, which generally come down to the luck of the draw. This way, Taichi’s rivalry with his childhood friend and insecurity regarding his own talent naturally reflect off each other, and result in a climax that feels like a genuine victory over a long-time personal failing.

Arata’s own presence also feels more natural here than in the anime. I was consistently frustrated with how removed Arata felt from the ongoing drama of the anime, as he only actually returns to karuta a good season and a half into the production. The film seems to understand this, and so shifts his grandfather’s death from an event some time in Arata’s past to a dramatic twist that we barely even get to over the course of this narrative. Because of that, Arata is able to actively compete in the tournament at this film’s halfway point, providing a dramatic obstacle for Taichi emotionally and Nishida physically, and giving Arata himself something important to do in the present narrative. It’s the kind of smart temporal shift you often see in draft revisions of larger projects, but which is impossible in an ongoing printed manga.

The film’s structures and revisions also greatly benefit Chihayafuru’s romantic aspirations. Across the course of fifty anime episodes, Taichi’s feelings towards Chihaya have shifted from “distant melodramatic longing” to “slightly less distant melodramatic longing,” meaning it’s been hard to really believe in the show’s own emphasis on its romance. Movies don’t have time for that crap – they don’t repeat points, cut unnecessary scenes, and generally work to achieve their own tightly scripted and hopefully harmonious dramatic goals. Meanwhile, the aesthetic demands of turning karuta into a strategically parsable showdown are so steep they’d almost be unmanageable for a film; so instead, Chihayafuru Part One wisely frames itself as more of a character story than a sports drama. When you combine these two needs, you end up with a film that’s happy to consistently engage with Taichi’s feelings of love and shame, giving his romantic aspirations weight while also giving his victory in karuta an emotional grounding.

It’s unsurprising that this film largely takes place from Taichi’s perspective. Even the original Chihayafuru seemed to ultimately realize that Taichi was truly the protagonist of this story; as the only one deeply invested in its romance, and also the long-suffering straight man of the group, his perspective was a far more natural grounding point than Chihaya’s boundless and somewhat unrelatable enthusiasm. Chihaya is a force of nature, which is great for provoking narratives, but not so great for emotional engagement. Taichi is a bundle of insecurities, and by giving his feelings towards Chihaya some genuine focus and sympathy, the film is able to make this trio’s relationship feel much more actively engaging than the anime.

All of this praise might make you think I actually prefer the film to the anime, but that’s not really the case; I just appreciate the film’s ability to smartly tighten the anime’s narrative, and preserve its core while ruthlessly cutting down on extraneous variables. It’s clear from variables as diverse as Chihaya’s Daddy Bear phone case and Nishida’s classic spin-slam-fall that this was a film composed with clear reverence for the source material, and it’s clear as well that this team understood Chihayafuru as it was originally written is a winding, unwieldy beast of a narrative. But in spite of its various abridgements and rewritings, so many of the manga’s best moments are preserved. I am endlessly grateful that the climax of this film comes not with some thrilling karuta victory, but when Tsutomu breaks down in tears on the tatami mat, accepting at last that his friends truly want him there. When you cut out all the extraneous trappings, Chihayafuru is a story of friendship, and this film preserves that beautifully.

Of course, there’s also the karuta. With two matches on each side and only Taichi’s fight remaining, Chihayafuru Part One ends on a showdown between him and our old (unnamed, but still obvious) friend Retro, with only one card each remaining. Chihayafuru wisely grasps that these 1-on-1 matches are karuta’s best dramatic weapon; they are essentially western duals, with each gunslinger’s hand held lightly above their holster. Fusing Taichi’s romantic hopes with both his childhood regrets and terrible luck, Harada articulates exactly what he must hear: “if you know it won’t come, you should come and get it.” Taichi fights for that card, and stabs at Retro so emphatically he forces a fault, ensuring his own victory. I actually cheered out loud in that moment, both for its own thrilling energy and for its validation of these characters, this story, this world. Chihayafuru Part One isn’t a perfect film, but it is perfectly Chihayafuru. I can think of little greater praise than that.

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