I was extremely disappointed in this movie. Ai Yazawa is one of my favorite mangakas and her work has revolutionized shoujo manga as a whole, she focuses on characters and gives them a multi-dimensional take that creates complex relationships and realistic problematics. This movie took all of that away. They made a bland romantic comedy out of a complex and interesting story. By changing the ending, they let her settle with the person that Yazawa spent 5 volumes explaining in detail why she wasn't supposed to end with. They were bad for each other, very bad, and no matter how much they tried, they just were not good as a couple. This was never meant to be a cutesy romantic comedy, that's not what Yazawa writes, this was meant to be a manga about extremely different people with very complex walks of life coming to age and facing what lies ahead of high school. Yes, there is romance, but not in a fairy-tale happy-ending kind of way. Not to mention the aesthetic is way off and I saw more fashion in Runway Beat than I saw in this movie (I've seen cosplayers doing better renditions of that blue dress). I also believe the casting choices were very weird, casting an actor with the range of Yususke Yamamoto for a character that is extremely low-key and Osamu Mukai for a character that should be excessively over the top, I don’t know how that happened. I can only appreciate Shunji's performance as Isabella, who is my favorite character in the manga, and who should have had more time to develop herself as a transgender woman facing an unaccepting world, but Shunji did the best he could under the circumstances. I can understand that people who have never read Ai Yazawa could have enjoyed this, but I sincerely can’t look past what they did with a story that was so well written. Especially, after the NANA movies were so well-done, I was really expecting more. If you have read the manga and liked it, I recommend you watch this movie with a punching bag beside you. If you haven’t read the manga and loved this movie, the manga is probably not for you.