Onscreen Text in All About Lily Chou-Chou

In All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001, dir. Shunji Iwai), many conflicting modes of filmmaking are on display, from pristine, saturated 35-lookalike digital cinematography to overexposed night vision and DV home video, from planimetric wides of stunning vistas to jump cut, tight handheld. But the most transgressive of all these various choices is the film’s liberal use of onscreen text. Onscreen text is one of the big no-nos of filmmaking, as we all know the mantra “show, don’t tell,” and text is a direct violation of that. But Iwai uses movement to make his text cinematically compelling, and uses text to embrace the thematic contemporaneity of his film’s universe.

The biggest obstacle onscreen text faces is stasis. For the audience, suddenly having to read text while watching moving images has the considerable effect of halting momentum. Filmmakers have devised myriad ways of working around this problem – animated text bubbles are a common one in the digital age – but I’ve never seen one as entrancing as Iwai’s. Iwai animates each line like a decipherment of computer code. That already provides substantial visual momentum, but the typographic design is an even better touch. Eschewing GUI elements that would date the text (think The Matrix), Iwai goes for a clean and classy serif font design, guaranteeing a timelessness to the text. Thirdly, Iwai names the speaker of each line after the line itself, resulting in two layers of guesswork: 1. who’s speaking and 2. who the screen name’s representing. There are entire conversations and even an entire parallel layer of storytelling going on in the onscreen text side of things. All of these make All About Lily Chou-Chou’s text visually engrossing not boring.

“We’re alive!” say 1s and 0s.

But as we can see in today’s content, animating text is just lessening evil, and still doesn’t justify text’s prominence. It’s Iwai’s all-out embrace of it that strikes me as revolutionary and thematically rich. Since this is a film made in the 21st century, about the 21st century, for a 21st century audience, there is no escape from a staple as integral to life nowadays as the online text. Instead of tossing text aside or treating it embarrassedly, like a necessary evil, Iwai fully incorporates it as a valid visual element at his disposal, staging the emotional climax of his film entirely through onscreen text. That’s how many emotional confrontations happen in the real world nowadays, and Iwai appropriately translates that very human experience to the big screen. If it feels alienating, that’s because real life is alienating, and fragmented, detached, etc. The parallel layer of storytelling mirrors the existence of the parallel universe that is the internet.

In defying the conventional dos-and-don’ts of cinema, Iwai has created a new form of cinema that sits right in the 21st century. (This is in line with his other experiments like digital cinematography and mixed media marketing.) He has given it significant depth and weight; it carries big storytelling responsibilities, and is frequently, complexly at odds with the live-action layer of the story. As many great filmmakers have noted, it’s specificity that gives you universality. Iwai’s text is true to the experience of 14-year-olds in 2001 Japan. It doesn’t matter if the text looks dated (it does not). Iwai’s use of text has contemporariness and authenticity that are still emotionally moving 20 years since its release, and will still be recognized by audiences in 2100, regardless of language, geography, and technology.

From a purely formal angle, Iwai has done much to alleviate the usual problems onscreen text encounters. And from a thematic angle, Iwai has rewritten the possibilities of cinema and captured life with an authenticity that has prolonged his film’s lifespan, all through the use of something as ostensibly bland as onscreen text.