A young woman from Hokkaido leaves her safe home to study at a university in Tokyo. She’s all alone, but she has a mission that she keeps secret from us. Is she pregnant? Is she a man? Is she a lesbian, or did she die in a car accident?
Now, this is what you call a super cute Japanese movie that I enjoyed. It’s so sugoi, and Takako Matsu is just too charming here. I wanted to put her in an ice cream bucket and eat her up. She couldn’t be more innocent when Princess Charming sets foot in Tokyo. But it’s not easy to come from Hokkaido as her classmates laugh at her since she is so quirky. How dare they! She is too charming to spend time with those jealous losers! She doesn’t understand the social rules in the big city and how cold the big city is. Someone must save her now!
“April Story” is a short movie with a runtime of just 67 minutes. So we never get to know the characters that the protagonist meets, but we learn who she is, a charming woman who is all alone in the big city. But she is also afraid of creepy men trying to get closer to her when she’s at the cinema. That scene is long, but so funny when a loser of a man tries to get closer and closer to Princess Charming.
Besides that scene, another favorite of mine is when she tries to invite her neighbor to eat with her, but she receives a cold shoulder. It was so difficult to see her sitting there all alone and eating her homemade food. That scene punched me in the stomach. She is an angel, and that scene tells us how the world treats a kind angel like her when she leaves her safe nest for the real and cruel world.
So this is a character that discovers the real world, a world she never should have entered maybe? She is too innocent to be all alone by herself, and she needs a real man in her life! Enter the creepy guy!
Toward the end, the movie drags out a surprise from its hat, and then the movie ends. The ending could have been a little better because it turns out that the young woman is a dreamer, and we find out the reason why she traveled to Tokyo. But the atmosphere is fantastic and relaxing, and Takako Matsu is just too cute.