All About Lily Chou-Chou (リリイ・シュシュのすべて, Rirī Shushu no Subete) is a 2001 Japanese experimental coming-of-age film, written, directed, and edited by Shunji Iwai.

These features, which have led the film to be described as restless or "explosive",[2] are viewed by critics as efforts to artistically evoke the emotional lives of disaffected Japanese youth.

All About Lily Chou-Chou follows the lives of two boys, Yūichi Hasumi and Shūsuke Hoshino, from the start of junior high school into their second year.

The film flashes back to the previous year, where Shusuke is introduced as the academically gifted class president who meets Yuichi at the school's kendo club.

The pair become close friends, and Shusuke invites Yuichi to stay over at his house, introducing him to Lily Chou-Chou's music.

An alternative voice, that of the character Sumika Kanzaki, attributes Shusuke's personality change to the collapse of his family's business and his parents' divorce.

He is ridiculed and coerced into doing Shusuke's dirty work and finds solace only in the ethereal music of Lily Chou-Chou and chatting with his online friends on his fan website.

Comparing it to The 400 Blows (1959), Andrew O'Hehir dubbed All About Lily Chou-Chou "sprawling and adventurous [...] [Iwai's] movie has a youthful restlessness, an almost compulsive daring".

Club, Iwai aimed to capture the feeling of being a teenager; the writer claimed that it "mimics the aimless, unformed rhythms of adolescent life" by "[d]rifting through time and space without firmly situating the viewer".

[5] Michael Atkinson of The Village Voice noted, "Flashbacks are scant signified, and jump cuts leave out massive amounts of motivating incident [...] Iwai prefers to observe from a distance, and he has a taste for disjunctive visuals".

[6] O'Hehir placed the film within the "cinema of globalization" and said that Iwai makes "the oldest possible complaint about modern culture: that as it purports to bring people together it actually keeps them separate".

[2] While Thomas agreed that the film supports the idea that traditional social structures prevent the rise of disaffected youth, he also wrote that the teens' brutality and allegiance to a sadistic leader strongly resembled the militarism of Japan during World War II.

He argued that the work overly lacks narrative cues, but still wrote that "Iwai fashions pensive cyber-lyricism out of a new generation’s instruments of introversion".

Club, Scott Tobias wrote, "Iwai's arty self-consciousness takes some getting used to, but as the film slides inexorably toward a devastating third act, it seems to tighten its grasp on the sad, painful remove that governs its young characters' lives.

"[5] Kevin Thomas wrote a moderately positive review in Los Angeles Times, calling the work "maddeningly hard to follow" but also "profoundly disturbing [...] Iwai’s depiction of what life can be like for far too many teens comes across loud and clear.