Female ambition, friendship and rivalry can, mixed together, make for a potent cinematic brew. "All About Eve" is one well-known example, though the relationship between Bette Davis' insecure middle-aged actress and Anne Baxter's worshipful, secretly scheming acolyte can hardly be called "friendship."
Shosuke Kaneko's "Pride" and Koichi Inoue's "Kanna-san Daiseiko Desu!" ("Kanna's Big Success!") may have the same basic "girls, be ambitious" message, but their takes on it are totally different.
"Kanna-san," stars supermodel Yu Yamada as the title character — a ditz who becomes a stunning beauty through the miracle of plastic surgery. The script, by Yuko Matsuda, is based on a Yumiko Suzuki comic that was also the source of the 2007 hit Korean comedy "200 Pounds Beauty." The Japanese film is not a remake, but a reworking of the comic, starting with an animated sequence in which a plain, fat, morose Kanna drudges away as a seamstress in a factory.