The festive season wouldn¡¯t be complete without a nice turkey, and Yoichi Narita¡¯s ¡°Till We Meet Again on the Lily Hill¡± delivers the goods. Handsomely crafted and staggeringly silly, it¡¯s the tale of a modern teen who gets whisked back to WWII-era Japan and swept off her feet by a handsome kamikaze pilot.
If that sounds like the stuff of fan fiction, you aren¡¯t far off: The film is based on a 2016 story by Natsue Shiomi, which was first published as a keitai sh¨setsu (cellphone novel). Narita¡¯s adaptation, co-written with Masahiro Yamaura, sticks closely to the source material but gives it an attractive gloss, resulting in the cinematic equivalent of a 100-yen store gift in immaculate wrapping paper.
Yuri Kano (Haruka Fukuhara) is a sullen 18-year-old high schooler who¡¯s planning to head straight into the workforce after graduation, despite her evident academic talent. She¡¯s embarrassed by her supermarket employee mom (Tomoko Nakajima) and resentful of her late father, who lost his life while saving someone else¡¯s child.
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