01
All About Lily Chou-Chou
Why this pick
Iwai again pairs a yearning youth perspective with music-saturated, highly stylized images, finding beauty and alienation in a world that feels emotionally unmoored.
A FILM WORTH A CLOSER LOOKTHE FEATURE PRESENTATION
MOVIE1996 2h 26m JPN
IF THIS ONE STAYED WITH YOU
Movies like
Swallowtail Butterfly
DramaCrime
CINEHUNCH / THE NEXT FRAME
Keep the feeling.
SIMILAR PICKS / A PERSONAL CONNECTION
If you loved Swallowtail Butterfly, try these.
01
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Love & Pop
Why this pick
Its restless handheld and distorted-camera Tokyo turns adolescent drift and consumer desire into the same kind of feverish, unstable city experience as Swallowtail Butterfly.
03
Kamikaze Girls
Why this pick
For the exuberant pop visual language and unlikely female friendship: it is more comic, but similarly transforms marginal lives into a colorful, emotionally sincere urban fable.
04
Blue Spring
Why this pick
Its disaffected teenagers, sudden violence, and music-driven cool offer a harsher counterpart to Swallowtail Butterfly’s youthful found-family energy and stylized criminal margins.
05
Tokyo Drifter
Why this pick
A neon-bright crime melodrama whose artificial cityscapes, musical flourishes, and drifting underworld protagonist anticipate the heightened, fairy-tale urban sensibility of Swallowtail Butterfly.
Finding the atmosphere, tension and little details that made this one stay with you.
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01 / THE STORY
A little about the film.
The film is set in Tokyo at an unspecified point in the near future when the Japanese yen has become the strongest currency in the world. This attracts an influx of Immigration, legal and illegal, to work in the city. The immigrants give the city the nickname . The Japanese natives, however, despise the nickname, and in retribution call the immigrants by the homophone , anglicized as "Yentowns" in the film's English subtitles.
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02 / FACES IN THE FRAME
The people who bring it to life.
Atsuro Watabe
Ran
Andy Hui
Maofuu
Nene Otsuka
Ken Enomoto
Toshiya Sakai
Tadanobu Asano
Customer in club
Ayumi Ito
Ageha
Hiroshi Mikami
Feihong