"Momentary Lily" Original Anime New Key Visual, PV
Premieres January 2025. The new PV is here. Check out the ANN article for additional cast/staff information. There is no synopsis for the series yet that I have found.
Looks to be pretty standard cute girls doing cute things. Between the art style and the setting, it most made me think of GochiUsa with a bit of Kin-iro Mosaic thrown in.
Though that word "lily" leaps right out, since that's almost certainly a ham-handed localization of "yuri."
I am guessing it is a pun based on my limited knowledge of the language. I never knew before why the lily flower was synonymous with yuri relationships, but I just looked it up and it's because the way you pronounce the kanji for the lily flower (百合) is yuri (ゆり) and the lily was traditionally associated with women's purity in Japan. Then, in the 70's, it was used to describe lesbian readers of a BL magazine by the editor and it kind of took off from there.
The title is written as リリィ which is "riri" (or lily) but written a little weirdly with the small ィ at the end. I don't know enough about the nuances of katakana to know the significance there. I am guessing that the Lily part of the title is literally correct, but that the target audience is supposed to get the second meaning implying yuri.
Then again, I am not a native Japanese speaker...so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
リリィ is a common way to write it, although I'm not sure why it's more common than リリー (perhaps just cause the ィ is more of a phonetic addition rather than a semantic one). Here's a list of fictional characters whose name is spelled リリィ. It's probably supposed to be a less obvious way to evoke the idea of yuri. There seem to be a couple other series that have had similar titles like "Comicリリィ" or "アサルトリリィ Bouquet".
Anyway, the "Lily" isn't the only remarkable part of the title, what does "Momentary" mean here? Leave it to Japanese pop media to take random English words to make titles that kinda work? but wouldn't really work well in English. Shoutouts to "Battle Tendency" and "Delicious in Dungeon".
But yeah, it's definitely not a localization of yuri/ユリ/百合 because the title doesn't say that at all.
Thank you for the information! I would have thought リリー would be the typical way to write it, but katakana can be weird like that. I once looked up how to write my name in katakana and was completely dumbfounded by how its done (wa = ウォ for some reason).