General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

Hana and Alice (花とアリス)

Hana and Alice (花とアリス, Hana to Arisu) is a 2004 Japanese youth drama film written, directed, produced, edited, and scored by Shunji Iwai, starring Anne Suzuki as Hana and Yu Aoi as Alice, two high school friends whose bond is tested by a lie told to the boy they both come to love.¹ It was released in Japan on March 13, 2004, distributed by Toho, with a running time of 135 minutes.²

Key fact	Detail
Japanese title	花とアリス (Hana to Arisu, also romanized Hana & Alice)²
Release	March 13, 2004, Toho distribution, 135 minutes, color, 35 mm²
Principal cast	Anne Suzuki as Hana (Arai Hana), Yu Aoi as Alice (Arisugawa Tetsuko), Tomohiro Kaku as Masashi Miyamoto³
Origin	Expanded from web-distributed short films made for KitKat Japan's 30th anniversary, streamed about 3 million times in 2003⁴
Key crew	Cinematography Noboru Shinoda, art direction Yohei Taneda²
Follow-up	Animated prequel The Case of Hana & Alice (2015), with the same two lead actors⁵

Spoilers

Story

Hana and Alice are close friends who attend the same ballet class as junior high students. Hana falls for Masashi Miyamoto, an older student she sees on her way to school, and the two girls follow him to the high school he attends, Tezuka High School, where they enroll; Hana joins the rakugo study club he belongs to.¹ One day Miyamoto hits his head on a garage shutter and loses consciousness. While he is dazed, Hana seizes the moment to convince him that she is his girlfriend, and the lie escalates: to sustain it she draws in her friend Alice, a girl who aims to become a model, to play the role of Miyamoto's ex-girlfriend.⁶

The deception backfires. Miyamoto falls for Alice, and Alice finds herself drawn to him as well; the two begin meeting behind Hana's back. The triangle resolves when each girl steps aside for the other: Alice withdraws for Hana's sake, and Hana, in turn, resolves to tell Miyamoto the truth and give him up. Alice then performs ballet at an audition, passes, and appears on the cover of a fashion magazine, an occasion on which the two friends reconcile.⁶

The Case of Hana & Alice

Iwai conceived a prequel shortly after finishing the 2004 film, and the script was completed in 2004; the morning the manuscript was finished Shinoda died, and the first printed script was placed in his coffin.¹⁶ The result, the animated feature The Case of Hana & Alice (花とアリス殺人事件, 2015), was Iwai's first theatrical feature animation. It brings back the same cast and tells how Hana and Alice met: transfer student Alice hears a rumor that a classmate named Yuda was murdered by four Yudas in classroom 3-2 a year earlier, and the two investigate what is called the world's smallest murder case.⁵ The animation combines rotoscoping, in which nearly every scene was first shot in live action, with cel-look 3DCG; the film won the Excellence Award in the Animation Division of the 19th Japan Media Arts Festival and was nominated in the feature competition of the Annecy International Animated Film Festival.⁵^•¹⁷

From web shorts to feature

The film began as a promotion project for the chocolate snack KitKat, marking the 30th anniversary of its Japanese release. Iwai's short films were distributed on the web from March to December 2003 and recorded about 3 million streams; the feature version added substantial new episodes to that material.⁴ The short version consisted of four episodes, "Hana's Love" (花の恋), "Hana's Storm I: Secret" (花の嵐Ⅰ―秘密―), "Hana's Storm II: Mêlée" (花の嵐Ⅱ―乱舞―), and "Hana and Alice" (花とアリス), a structure whose titles already show that Hana was the short's central viewpoint.⁷ Iwai said in interviews at the time that he had first intended to portray Alice through Hana's eyes, but that the two characters' positions gradually became evenly balanced and the story changed as a result.⁸

Production and style

Iwai held the posts of director, screenwriter, producer, editor, and composer, with Noboru Shinoda as cinematographer, Shinichiro Kakuma on camera, and Yohei Taneda as art director.² Writing on the film has emphasized that it was the last work Iwai made with Shinoda, and one critic has called it, in a sense, a culmination of Iwai's work up to that point.⁹ The production used mobile, video-origin shooting, and Iwai's own classical-styled score runs prominently through the film.¹⁰

The film's most celebrated sequence is the climax in which Alice, scouted as a model, dances ballet at an audition wearing paper cups as shoes, a scene frequently singled out as showcasing Aoi's appeal.¹¹ A scene in which a friend from the photography club films the two girls at play has also been noted for its beauty.¹²

Reception

On the review aggregator Kinenote the film holds an average score of 75.7 points from 727 users.⁶ Yu Aoi received the Japan Movie Critics Award (日本映画プロフェッショナル大賞) for lead actress for her performance.⁸ Critics have read the film as a study of memory as much as a romance: the critic Takashi Kitakoji argued that Hana tries to rewrite her senpai's memory to make him her boyfriend, and that the film's reversals make it something other than a pure love story, since Iwai treats love as being as ambiguous as memory itself.¹³ The film was screened in the Japan Now section of the 30th Tokyo International Film Festival in 2017 as part of a tribute to Aoi.¹⁴ A theatrical re-release began on December 26, 2025, at TOHO Cinemas Hibiya and other theaters, planned by Rockwell Eyes and K2 Pictures.¹⁵

Home video and streaming

Pony Canyon released the film on Blu-ray in Japan on September 5, 2012, priced at 4,180 yen with a listed running time of about 135 minutes.¹⁸ As of 2026 the film streams on U-NEXT and Nihon Eiga Net Amazon Channel, with rental on Amazon Video, Apple TV Store, and FOD.¹⁹

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026