Aiko Sweet 16 is about a sixteen-year-old Japanese girl named Aiko and her experiences at school over the summer. Aiko, the main character, is a very energetic and a bit of a delinquent. The other main character is Beniko, she is a brown-nosier and Aiko dislikes her in the beginning but later they become friends. The story (as best as I could follow) starts of a comedy about Akio and her antics.

She does things such as climbing of her home’s roof, sneaking into class thru a window so she isn’t late, and gossiping about Beniko. After about halfway into the movie Akio’s teacher tries to commit suicide and Akio has a screaming fit at her classmates for gossiping about the teacher. Because of that Aiko and Beniko become friends and go to visit the teacher in the hospital. On the way home from the hospital Akio sees someone (who may be her ex-boyfriend) get kill in a motorcycle accident. Aiko becomes hysterical and runs home crying, but the next day she’s ok again and the movie ends with her standing on the roof waving to her friends.

This movie was rather hard to understand because of poor translation. For example when Akio calls Beniko a Brown-nosier it is translated, “She’s an automatic apple polisher.” The translation becomes especially bad during important moments such as Akio’s lecture to her classmates and during her internal monologs.

The translation is primarily what made the movie hard to follow. Another thing that was unsetting was that the movie had a patter of lots of silly antic punctuated with dead cats, suicide victims, abortions, etc. I couldn’t become sure of whether the movie was a comedy or a tragedy. Finally I was confused as to why is the title to the movie written is katakana when Aiko is a Japanese name?