He loves me, he loves me not

Hana to Alice

Rating: * * 1/2 (out of 5)
Director: Shunji Iwai
Running time: 135 minutes
Language: Japanese
Currently showing

"Shunji Iwai has a shojo manga (girls' comic) sensibility," producer Takenori Sento once explained to me.

That's not quite fair: Iwai's core audience -- young, hip urban women -- has probably long since outgrown "Ribbon." But, shojo mangalike, Iwai's films often deal with young love, with the female leads in "Love Letter" (1997) and "Shigatsu Monogatari" (1998) the focus of attention; the males, the passive objects of it. In "All About Lilly Chou Chou" (2002) the protagonist is a teenage boy obsessed with a mysterious female pop singer, but pathetically weak in protecting the girls he likes from sadistic classmates. In other words, a shojo-manga horror story, but one true to a lot of adolescent lives, inner or otherwise -- a factor that made the film a long-running hit.

Iwai's latest is "Hana to Alice (Hana & Alice)," which began life early last year as four short films on the Nestle company Web site as promos for Kit Kat candy bars. By the end of 2003 the films had attracted nearly 3 million hits and Iwai and his backers had decided to turn them into a feature film. No stats on how many hits were from shojo-manga readers.