All About Lily Chou-Chou

is a 2001 Japanese experimental coming-of-age film written, directed and edited 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. The film is noted for an unconventional visual style which includes many jump cuts and shots with disjunctive contents, as well as for an elliptical narrative. These features, which have led the film to be described as restless or "explosive", are viewed by critics as efforts to artistically evoke the emotional lives of disaffected Japanese youth. Critics mostly expressed positive views on All About Lily Chou-Chou. While some found the story's ambiguity frustrating, the film's lyricism drew praise. Plot All About Lily Chou-Chou follows two boys, Yūichi Hasumi and Shūsuke Hoshino from the start of junior middle school into the eighth 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.