is a 2001 Japanese experimental coming-of-age film written, directed and edited by Shunji Iwai, that portrays the lives of 14-year-old students in Japan and the effect the enigmatic singer Lily Chou-Chou's music has on some of them.
The film is noted for an unconventional visual style which includes many jump cuts and shots with disjunctive contents, as well as for an elliptical narrative. These features, which have led the film to be described as restless or "explosive", are viewed by critics as efforts to artistically evoke the emotional lives of disaffected Japanese youth.
Critics mostly expressed positive views on All About Lily Chou-Chou. While some found the story's ambiguity frustrating, the film's lyricism drew praise.
Plot
All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two boys, Yūichi Hasumi and Shūsuke Hoshino from the start of junior middle school into the eighth grade. The film has a discontinuous storyline, starting midway through the story, just after the second term of junior high school begins, then flashes back to the first term and summer vacation, and then skips back to the present.
Fourteen year-old Yuichi Hasumi runs a fan site and message board for Lily Chou-Chou, his favourite singer. Posting under the alias "Philia", he befriends another user named "Blue Cat". A shy and socially-outcast teenager, Yuichi is viciously bullied by his older classmate Shusuke Hoshino and his gang, who beat him and force him to publicly masturbate. The film flashes back to the previous year, where Shusuke is introduced as the academically gifted class president who meets Yuichi at the school's kendo club. The pair become close friends, and Shusuke invites Yuichi to stay over at his house, introducing him to Lily Chou-Chou's music. Yuichi is moved by her music, joining her cult following. Back at school, he develops a crush on his classmate, Kuno.
On summer vacation, Shusuke, Yuichi, and their friends decide to take a trip to Okinawa. Once there, Shusuke has a traumatic near-death experience and his personality changes from good-natured to dangerous and manipulative. Returning to school in September, he takes his place as class bully and shows his newfound power by ruining the lives of his classmates. An alternative voice, that of the character Sumika Kanzaki, attributes Shusuke's personality change to the collapse of his family's business and his parents' divorce.
Yuichi finds himself sucked into his now-tormentor's gang. He is ridiculed and coerced into doing Shusuke's dirty work, and finds solace only in the ethereal music of Lily Chou-Chou and chatting with his online friends on his fan website. Things become far worse for everyone when Yuichi is assigned to supervising Shiori Tsuda, whom Shusuke has blackmailed into enjo kōsai. Kuno is raped by Shusuke's lackeys after unwittingly offending the school's girl gang. A guilt-ridden Yuichi lends Tsuda his copy of Lily Chou-Chou's album; she later dies by suicide. Yuichi, grieving, is talked out of suicide by Blue Cat in a series of online messages.
Yuichi heads to Tokyo to see a Lily Chou-Chou concert, where him and "Blue Cat" have also arranged to meet in person. Yuichi runs into Shusuke, who coercively throws away Yuichi's ticket. Yuichi watches the concert outside on a screen and realizes that Shusuke was Blue Cat. Yuichi stabs him in the middle of a crowd after the concert, killing him.
At home, Yuichi begins his life again, reconciling with his schoolteacher and dyeing his hair. He shares a moment with Kuno as she plays piano. The movie's final scene shows Yuichi, Shusuke, and Tsuda standing alone in a field, listening to the music of Lily Chou-Chou.
Production
On April 1, 2000, Shunji Iwai went live with his internet novel, in the form of a website called Lilyholic, where he posted messages as several characters on the BBS. Readers of the novel were free to post alongside Iwai's characters and interact with each other, indeed this BBS is where some of the content from the movie comes from. After the main incident in the novel took place, posting was closed and the second phase of the novel started, about the lives of 14-year-olds. (The novel is available on CD-ROM, but only in Japanese.)
Production on the film began in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture on August 13, 2000, and ended on November 28, 2000. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7, 2001, and opened in Japan on October 6, 2001.
Iwai was the first Japanese director to use the, at the time, completely new digital video camera, the Sony HDW-F900 to shoot the film.