I remembered hearing about this when it was released just before I moved to Korea. Then, by accident I found this review in the From the Archive section on Reverse Shot, read it, and got a hold of it right away (it’s also posted on YouTube w/subtitles in 17 parts).

All About Lily Chou-Chou, which was based on an Internet novel in Japan (partly written by netizens), is mostly about bullying in a rural Japanese high school. But it’s also about a subject I’ve always found personally fascinating —  the rabid effect of pop music on kids, which, in the movie is directly related to the bullying itself.

From Reverse Shot:

The imaginary pop idol Lily Chou-Chou is the invisible sun that the students orbit in Iwai’s luminous rural-prefecture landscape. She does not appear onscreen in person (except once, as an apparition on a grainy Jumbotron), but she seems a waking, walking dream in the minds of her young fans. It’s a presence Iwai boldly conveys through the modern teenager’s twist on marathon phone calls and hallway huddles: instant messaging, in a chat room devoted to the singer. In Iwai’s rendering, the screen goes black, sometimes abruptly, as white computer text splashes out, 10 to 15 words in spastic touch-typed bunches. Sometimes Iwai lets the words remain superimposed over the proceeding images, but never enough to push the film into the stuffy vocabulary of multimedia.

I won’t go too in-depth here, but this one is well worth watching. It’s a complicated movie, and there are a couple flashbacks — one that shows the main character being bullied, which sets up the entire scheme of the bullying (and pimping) he does once he gets to high school — that are quite jarring.

But in the end it ties everything together really well. These kids are equally viscous to one another and only have one outlet, which is the music that comes out of their headphones. But this is much deeper than, say, 8-Mile or most other teen angst films. In a strange way you understand the kids viciousness and may even condone it. Now when I walk around my neighborhood and see groups of Korean students hanging out I think I have a different (and a little better) understanding of what they’re doing and thinking.

As far as I can tell the film has an ongoing following in Japan and there are several music videos made my fans that you can also find on YouTube. I’m posting this one because I think it acts as a kind of trailer for people thinking of checking it out.