Rating summary

Movie		4.0
Video		5.0
Audio		4.0
Extras		3.0
Overall		4.0

All About Lily Chou-Chou Blu-ray Movie Review

Reviewed by Dr. Stephen Larson November 21, 2019

Japanese cinema of the early 2000s released films about troubled youths, survivor stories, and painful losses. These included Shunji Iwai's All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001), Hirokazu Kore-eda's Distance (2001), and Shinji Aoyama's Eureka (2000). The latter was praised pretty highly by critics but its run time of nearly four hours and bleak subject prevented it from gaining wider exposure. Kore-eda's great film Distance played at only a few festivals (including Cannes where there were walk-outs) and unfortunately is likely his least-seen feature. Iwai's fifth feature was the easily the most commercially successful of the three. According to film festival programmer Stephen Cremin, All About Lily Chou-Chou raked in more than three billion yen ($27 million) in Japan, more than twenty times its original budget. The story's concept first began as a script for a prank, morphed into a novel, developed into an uncompleted screenplay, and then an Internet novel.

Like Distance, its approach is experimental but it taps into Japanese teens' technological dependency much more so than Kore-eda's third fictional film does. Iwai takes his title from a Bjork-like musician who garners the adoration of 13- to 15-year-olds. The narrative isn't so much reliant on the plot as it is on the free-flowing chats the teens have on the Bulletin Board System (BBS) from the singer's Lilyholic website. The image is often framed with a black screen (simulacra for a computer monitor) as the teens type in their thoughts about Lily's music. Iwai and his editor Yoshiharu Nakagami sometime intercut the text screens with poetic shots of Lily superfan Yuichi (Hayato Ichihara) in a rice field. Yuichi has a crush on Yoko (Ayumi Ito), a piano prodigy. Both are victims of the bully cliques at school. Yuichi's one-time friend Hoshino (Shugo Oshinari) forces Yuichi to steal cash and give it to him. Hoshino also makes Shiori (Yu Aoi), who has a secret crush on Yuichi, prostitute herself for local businessmen and hand her earnings back to Hoshino.

I'd nominate this for the Opening Shot Hall of Fame.

It's expressed in the film that Lily takes inspiration from Claude Debussy and Iwai makes brilliant use of a vicious counterpoint between image and sound. During harrowing scenes of physical bullying and sexual violence, Iwai counters with the soft, twinkling notes of such Debussy pieces as Arabesque and Clair de Lune. The juxtaposition is wholly appropriate since music is both an escape and a salvation for the victimized teens. At nearly two and a half hours, All About Lily Chou-Chou is like a long musical movement, slow and meandering with many detours.

All About Lily Chou-Chou Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

All About Lily Chou-Chou makes its North American debut on Blu-ray courtesy of the Film Movement on this MPEG-4 AVC-encoded BD-50. The movie was one of the very first to be shot on Sony's CineAlta 24p HD camera. It's been available in high-def in Japan since 2012 when Pony Canyon released it, followed by another edition in South Korea four years later. BD authoring work for F.M. was conducted by Minneapolis-based Double Agent Digital. The film appears in its original exhibition ratio of 1.78:1. I remember years ago waiting for a US DVD and became thrilled when I heard Home Vision Entertainment (Criterion's then-sister company) announced it would handle video distribution rights. But I was disappointed that the film received an interlaced transfer instead of a progressive scan. I've created a mini-comparison of the HD and SD transfers and the differences are far apart. Look at the video noise amidst the hazy cloud in Screenshot #17 compared to the bright natural light in #18. The HVE is conspicuously darker. Contrast is poor such as in #19. Cinematographer Noboru Shinoda frequently employs extremely bright light (overexposed in #10 and #11), halos and accented lighting (especially #3), and flashlight tints (#s 7 and 12). The image has a softer look for the home movie footage (#s 14 and 15). Film Movement has encoded the main feature at an average video bitrate of 30994 kbps.

The 146-minute film receives twelve scene selections. (HVE supplied twice as many.)

Film Movement 2019 BD-50 = Screenshot #s 1-16, 18, 20, 22 & 24
Home Vision Entertainement 2005 DVD = Screenshot #s 17, 19, 21, & 23

All About Lily Chou-Chou Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Film Movement has provided a Japanese DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 Surround (4212 kbps, 24-bit) and a lossy Japanese Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround (448 kbps). F.M. doesn't really distinguish between which is the lossless and which is compressed audio on the menu so I had to double-check the sound track on my receiver. I don't think Iwai and his sound artists conceived All About Lily Chou-Chou as a big 5.1 surround experience and it often feels like 2.0 stereo, which were the only tracks on the US and UK DVDs. Dialogue and sound effects are primarily situated on the center and front channels. There's good spatial depth and directionality for music and songs across the fronts and satellite speakers.

F.M. has supplied optional white English subtitles in a fairly tall (but not too big by default) sans serif font (see Screeenshot #18). There are sometimes embedded Japanese characters/subs displayed on the darkened screen and on the image so the English subs are placed below them.

All About Lily Chou-Chou Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

Film Movement has dropped the "Wings That Can't Fly" music video by Lily Chou-Chou and two trailers that appeared on HVE's disc.

• The Making of All About Lily Chou-Chou (1:26:12, 480i) - this was included on HVE's edition in a truncated 55-minute piece. This seems to be the full making-of doc. It traces the project's origins from the very beginning and incorporates interviews and video dairies with cast and crew members. The program is in Japanese with compulsory English subtitles and uses the MPEG-2 encode.

• NEW Film Movement Classics Booklet - a sixteen-page booklet featuring movie stills, a chapter list, cast/credits list, and two essays. The first piece by Shunji Iwai is a reprint from the HVE booklet. The director explains in some detail how the film came to be (it's in English). The second essay is written by Stephen Cremin (Deputy Director of NYAFF), who provides a good synopsis and analysis of the film.

All About Lily Chou-Chou Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

I've been a fan of Shunji Iwai's since the mid-2000s and have been waiting for a solid Blu-ray release of All About Lily Chou-Chou in the States since the format's inception. Film Movement's new restoration is a major revelation. It looks stunning and blows the SD releases out of the water. The movie is a tough watch but the verdant and highly expressive cinematography, coupled with an eclectic sound track of classical pieces and pop tunes, make it well worth seeing. It's great that F.M. has also included the full-length making-of doc. I admire Iwai's Love Letter (1995) and April Story (1998) and hope they also see the light of day in the US on HD. Lily Chou-Chou is STRONGLY RECOMMENDED.