Movies - All About Lily Chou-Chou

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	Movies - All About Lily Chou-Chou

All About Lily Chou-Chou (リリイ・シュシュのすべて Riri Shushu no subete) is a 2001 Japanese film written and directed by Shunji Iwai. The film portrays the lives of high school kids in Japan and was the first one to be shot with a Sony 24p digital camera.

Plot

All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two childhood friends, Hoshino and Yuichi. Hoshino is the best student in school, skilled at kendo, and has a good-looking young mom, while Yuichi is a quieter guy who loves to listen to the music of rock star Lily Chou-Chou. Halfway through the film, Hoshino has a near-death experience and changes completely for the worse, becoming the school's bully. He controls and ruins the lives of his classmates, and Yuichi becomes a lowly member of his gang.

The story of Hoshino and Yuichi is paralleled by messages posted to a Lily Chou-Chou Internet message board. It is left up to the viewer to figure out which characters in the story are posting under what names.

Production

On April 1st, 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 is only available in Japanese.)

Production on the film began in Ashikaga, Tochigi Prefecture on August 13th, 2000 and ended on November 28th, 2000. It premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival on September 7th, 2001, and opened in Japan on October 6th, 2001.

Iwai was the very first Japanese director to use the, at the time, completely new digital video camera, the "24 Progressive". He has often been a technological groundbreaker in his home country, having used non-linear Avid systems for the editing of his film Undo and adopting DTS for his famous April Story
. It is thought that Iwai was inspired to shoot in digital by his friend, the anime and live-action film director Hideaki Anno, who shot his own digital film, Love & Pop
, in 1998 (Anno later cast Iwai as the lead in his second live-action film, Shiki-Jitsu
).

Music

The soundtrack of Lily Chou-Chou was written and arranged by Takeshi Kobayashi, with vocals by Salyu. It features a number of songs that are sung by the fictional rock star Lily Chou-Chou in the film. The soundtrack also makes heavy use of the classical music of Claude Debussy.

Interpretation

Lily Chou-Chou was released in Japan amidst a wave of films portraying violent youth in Japan. Although Lily Chou-Chou can be seen as a more artistic addition to this type of film, there is also a theory that the film is not about Japanese teenagers at all. Rather, its portrayal of extreme violence, honor and subordinance, cruelty and beauty may be an examination of adult psychology.

Cast

Shugo Oshinari
as Hoshino, the best student in school who, after a trip to Okinawa, becomes a psychotic bully.
Hayato Ichihara as Yuichi, Hoshino's former friend who becomes a reluctant member of his gang and will later on be bullied by Hoshino. Yuichi is the leading character in the movie.
Ayumi Ito
as Kuno, a classmate and love interest of Yuchi's. A brilliant pianist, she's the envy of a clique of powerful girls, and therefore is also bullied.
Aoi Yuu as Tsuda, a classmate of Yuichi who gets blackmailed into prositution by Hoshino. Yuichi befriends her later on, and introduces her to Lily.
Yuki Ito as Kamino, one of the boys in the blue school uniforms at the trainstation when Kuno is introduced.

Trivia

Quentin Tarantino used the song "Kaifuku Suru Kizu (Healing Wounds)" from the Lily Chou-Chou soundtrack in Kill Bill
, in the scene where Hanzo makes the sword for The Bride.
The idea of Lily Chou-Chou the rock star was inspired by the famous Hong Kong singer and actress, Faye Wong
.
Every extra at the concert scene was given an index card with extremely detailed information as to the thought process they should be going through. There were hundreds of extras, partly made up of fans of the internet novel who had BBS meet ups during the day.
Ayumi Ito
spent weeks training on piano in order to do all of her scenes without a double. She became so obsessed with Debussy's Arabesque No 1 that it became her cell phone ringtone.
Originally, in the internet novel, Yuichi and Hoshino belong to the track team, not the kendo team.

[ Visit the complete Wikipedia entry for All About Lily Chou-Chou ]

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