All About Lily Chou-Chou
All About Lily Chou-Chou (リリイ・シュシュのすべて, Rirī Shushu no Subete) is a 2001 Japanese film, written and directed 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.
Plot
All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two boys, Shūsuke Hoshino and Yūichi Hasumi, from the start of junior middle school when they first meet, and into second 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.
In elementary school, Hoshino was one of the best students in school, but was picked on by his classmates. Hoshino and Hasumi meet and become friends when they join the kendo club, and Hoshino invites Hasumi to stay over at his house. Hoshino's family is wealthy in comparison to Hasumi's family. Hasumi mistakes Hoshino's attractive young mother for his sister.
Lily Chou-Chou
Lily Chou-Chou (リリイ シュシュ, Rirī Shushu) is a Japanese band that debuted in 2000. Initially a fictional band that produced music for the 2001 Shunji Iwai film All About Lily Chou-Chou, the group later reformed in 2010 for the 10th anniversary of the film. Lily Chou-Chou is not a person, she is a fictional character.
Biography
Lily Chou-Chou as a character was initially created by Shunji Iwai in 2000, as a part of an online novel that was posted on a BBS. The music was produced as a collaboration between Iwai, Salyu, a musician who had not debuted yet, and Takeshi Kobayashi, a music producer who had previously worked with Iwai on the soundtrack to his 1996 film Swallowtail Butterfly. Iwai supplied the lyrics of two songs to the project, "Arabesque" and "Tobenai Tsubasa."
In April 2000, Lily Chou-Chou music began to be released, with the single "Glide" and later "Kyōmei (Kūkyo na Ishi)" in June. Three Iwai-directed music videos were produced for the project, "Glide," "Kyōmei (Kūkyo na Ishi)" and "Tobenai Tsubasa." Salyu performed "Kyōmei (Kūkyo na Ishi)" on music shows Hey! Hey! Hey! Music Champ and Music Station in June 2000. The group released their album, Kokyū, in October 2001, a week and a half after the release of the film in Japan.
