Yuichi is a withdrawn kid, that has just started junior high school. He lives with his pregnant hairdresser mom, her boyfriend and his son in a rural part of Japan. He is tormented by bullies at school and loneliness inside his soul. The only place he really finds solace is within the music of Lily Chou-Chou and her fan website “Lil-philia” that he manages.

Through the website he is able to express his feelings about life through his adulation of Lily Chou-Chou’s music. He spends his time talking with other members of Lil-philia and becomes closest to a person that uses the name of Blue Cat on that website. Although they never knowingly meet each other in real life, the bond that they share is from far more than Lily Chou-Chou’s music. Yuichi explains that if he had died during the summer of 1999 he might have been happier than he is now, going through his first year in junior high school.

Yuichi returned from a fateful vacation to Okinawa during the summer of 1999, with his closest friends, including the class president Hoshino. During that trip, Hoshino goes through a near death experience when he nearly drowns off the coast of Okinawa. Hoshino not only goes through that near death drowning experience, but during this time his father’s factory goes bankrupt causing the breakup of his parents’ marriage. Hoshino returns to school as a different person, a far darker person, that finds pleasure in bullying & tormenting other classmates, including Yuichi.

The story is told in a non-linear fashion, with each of the major time segments flowing easily into the next, making it difficult to grasp when the changes in time occurred (at least on first viewing). Also, a unique technique that Shunji Iwai used, was a black screen that would appear during various times in the movie, where the website users would type messages about Lily Chou-Chou. Although the messages provided valuable insights into why Yuichi and Hoshino felt the way they did, at other times the appearance of the black screen and its typed messages would break the continuity of the film and become almost to the point of annoying.

If Iwai was able to implement those web messages in a manner similar to the way text messages flashed across the screen in “Take Care Of My Cat” it may have been more effective. If you didn’t catch this on first viewing, you should know that user on the Lily Chou-Chou website named “Blue Cat” was actually Hoshino (he had no idea that Yuichi was Philia and vice versa). Once you know that, you can then figure out that the girl Blue Cat talks about on the web page, that introduced him to Lily Chou-Chou and that he had on crush, was Yuichi and Hoshino’s classmate Kuno. When Yuichi walked Kuno to the abandoned factory, he told her that “he” was in the factory on the right. Although the movie never explicitly said who that person was, you can infer that it was Hoshino who called Yuichi to relay a message to Kuno that Hoshino wanted to meet her at the factory. Most likely, Kuno would not have went into that factory unless it was someone she knew well from her past. Hoshino, on the other hand, being the changed person, planned the rape and brought his video camera so he could get her to become one of his “workers” (prostitutes) like he did to Tsuda. After the rape, Kuno couldn’t go through the same type of ordeal as Tsuda, thus she cut off all of her hair.

An important part of that scene was how the teacher did nothing more than offer Kuno a wig to wear when class ended. Notice again, at the end of the film, when Yuichi’s teacher warns him that his grades have dropped like rock from a cliff, that the only words she could offer to him was, “try harder.” The inability of all the adults in the film to communicate with the younger people in the film was one of the more subtle aspects of the film that Shunji Iwai may have wanted to critique.

What’s always fun is to pick out familiar faces in foreign movies and in All About Lil Chou-Chou there was quite a few; including Kuno – who played the orphan girl in Iwai’s Swallowtail Butterfly, Tsuda – who went on to play Alice in Iwai’s Hana & Alice, Sasaki – the kid that played the conductor in this film appeared in Go as the book smart North Korean friend that got killed in the subway, as well as Hoshino – who was the computer whiz in Battle Royale.

If you have the patience or enjoy somewhat of a difficult film (non-linear), then by all means you should check out Shunji Iwai’s “All About Lily Chou-Chou.” The amount of depth packed into the film is mind boggling, while some of the scenes shot in the film, like the opening scene when Yuichi is standing in the field of grass by himself, was as good as anything I have ever seen before. Shunji Iwai, being Shunji Iwai does at times have a tendency to be overly indulgent (think back to some unnecessarily long scenes like in Swallowtail Butterfly when Glico sang entire songs or even in Hana and Alice, when Alice’s tryout performance ran for over 5 minutes) and All About Lily Chou Chou did sometimes suffer from these types of excesses. Nevertheless, the amount of beauty and sadness packed into this 2 and a half hour film is must see. Just be patient and perhaps watch it two times.