This week, All About Lily Chou-Chou turns 25. Shunji Iwai’s 2001 Japanese experimental psychological drama remains a touchstone for its unconventional visual style, which includes many jump cuts, and for its portrait of how an enigmatic solo musician influences the lives of 14-year-old students. The making of the film is just as unusual.
It began as an interactive internet novel
On April 1, 2000, Shunji Iwai went live with his internet novel in the form of a website called Lilyholic. He posted messages as several characters on a Bulletin Board System, and readers were free to post alongside Iwai’s characters and interact with each other. Some of the content in the movie comes directly from that BBS.
Readers could post alongside the characters
After the main incident in the novel took place, the 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.
Concert extras got detailed character cards
At the concert scene, extras were each given an index card with detailed information about their characters and even lines. There were nearly one thousand extras, some of whom were fans of the internet novel and had BBS meet-ups during the day.
It was a digital-video first for Japan
Iwai was the first Japanese director to use the Sony HDW-F900, at the time a completely new digital video camera, to shoot the film. Production began in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture on August 13, 2000, and ended on November 28, 2000.
Lily Chou-Chou’s voice belonged to Salyu
The soundtrack was written and arranged by Takeshi Kobayashi, with vocals by the singer Salyu. It features many songs sung by the fictional rock star Lily Chou-Chou in the film and heavily uses the classical music of Claude Debussy.
Quentin Tarantino put it fifth on his list
In Quentin Tarantino’s off-the-top-of-the-head best-of-list, All About Lily Chou-Chou is included in fifth place. The director expressed particular admiration for the film score: “The Lily Chou-Chou soundtrack is really cool to make out to.”
Critics split between beauty and frustration
The film has a 69% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes, based on 39 reviews, and a 73/100 average on Metacritic, based on 18 reviews. Roger Ebert gave the film two stars, dismissing the visual style as “tiresome and pretentious.” Atkinson, by contrast, referred to All About Lily Chou-Chou as “possibly the loveliest film ever shot on high-def video.”
Japan turned it into a sleeper hit
Released after its Toronto International Film Festival premiere on September 7, 2001, the film opened in Japan on October 6, 2001. It cost ¥150,000,000 and grossed ¥3,026,188,000 domestically in Japan, with an opening week gross of ¥514,775,000 and a release run of 15.7 weeks. Rentals in Japan reached ¥810,340,000.
Which of these details surprised you most, and what is your own favourite memory of All About Lily Chou-Chou?
Facts from Wikipedia: All About Lily Chou-Chou, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Film images from TMDB. This product uses the TMDB API but is not endorsed or certified by TMDB.
