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 shōsetsu (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.