Story:
It's Nozomi's birthday and she's looking forward to celebrating with all her friends. Naturally, her family is not attending her celebration because that would complicate things. In any case, a strange girl appears out of nowhere and our heroines have to rescue her from Bunbee. The girl in question is Princess Chocola from the Sweets kingdom. She offers to show the Precure around her kingdom as thanks but there's something rotten about these sweets and it's not that they cause cavities.
I have mixed feelings towards the story. Which is kind of how I've felt about everything related to Yes Precure 5. There are parts of the story I did enjoy. Seeing the girls frolic in the land of sweets is kind of fun and endearing. The whole section where they're separated into groups and have to rally their strength, fend off their attackers and then meet up is pretty solid. In contrast, the film does heavily push the incredibly gross and horribly written "romance" between a child and her adult teacher who also happens to be a squirrel. I still question who heard the pitch for that and thought it sounded acceptable. The climax is also kind of weak. It's just overly cheesy.
Characters:
I've already talked about these characters being trite archetypes and this film has no interest in changing that. So, let's talk about the important film exclusive characters. We have Chocola, who's the typical naïve, innocent girl. We also have the antagonist, Mushiban, who may have one of the dumbest villain motivations in the franchise's history. You see, he wants to find sweets that actually taste good because he just can't find a sweet to satisfy him. Bitch, hire a baker.
Art:
The artwork is mostly pretty solid with decent designs and animation that flows pretty smoothly. There are some awkward scenes where characters' eyes will look way too large for their heads in a few frames or some other art error makes its way on screen but it's really not a huge issue since it only happens a couple times.
Sound:
For how boring these characters are, the cast is completely solid. In addition to the regular cast we have Kawata Taeko as Chocola and Ootsuka Akio as Mushiban and they, like the main cast, give performances worthy of better characters. The music is pretty good.
Ho-yay:
There's a little bit. While the girls are frolicking we get a scene where Komachi and Karen feed each other like you would your significant other.
Areas of Improvement:
1. Stop shipping a young girl with an adult. Especially her teacher. The fact that he's a squirrel just makes it even worse. Just give Nozomi a love interest who's human and her own age. I don't care if you use one of the other Precure or some random dude or you do the Futari wa thing where she kind of has a guy she likes but mostly gets les-yay with another Precure.
2. This villain really needs better motivation. Even him hating sweets and wanting to do away with the kingdom to get rid of them would have been a lot less stupid.
3. The climax could have been executed a lot better either by letting all the Precure shine as opposed to putting the focus on Nozomi or by putting less focus on audience participation.
Final Thoughts:
I'm going to give this film the same score I went with for the series proper a 5/10. It suffers from a lot of the same pratfalls and also has the same kind of strong moments. Is it worth watching? Maybe if you actually really like Yes Precure 5.Otherwise, you can probably ignore it.
