There are too many animated movies to name that star children, but few capture how a child sees the world as well as “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain.” Based on a semi-autobiographical novel by author Amélie Nothomb, the film begins with the birth of the main character, a young Belgian girl whose father works as a diplomat in ’60s Japan, while the nation still had several scars from World War II. Precocious and believing herself to be a god, the young Amélie nonetheless has a child’s understanding of the world in which she lives, grappling with her identity as someone attached to the culture of her adopted home while also confronting death and real complex human feelings for the first time.
“Little Amélie” is the feature directorial debut of Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han, French filmmakers who first met as students studying animation at Gobelins Paris. The two went on to work on several animated films together, most notably 2015’s “The Little Prince” and “Long Way North.” During production on 2018 of “Calamity,” a film by “Long Way North” director Rémi Chayé, Han gave Vallade a copy of the original novel by Nothomb, which he had first read when he was 19. Both directors were attracted to the book’s philosophical look at early childhood, with Vallade describing the novel as short but an “explosion of the senses.”
“I remember the first time I read that book at the end, I think it was the first time I cried while reading a book,” Han said in an interview with IndieWire. “So it had a very, very strong impact on me.”
To adapt the book, Mallade and Han took inspiration from the movies they made under Chayé, which have a simple and impressionistic hand-drawn aesthetic. The resulting work, which premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in May, is a gorgeous 2D animated creation, vibrantly combines colors to create Amélie’s world. For the animation, Mallade took some inspiration from “Japonisme,” a nineteenth-century French artistic movement that saw post-impressionist visual artists in the country take significant inspiration from Japanese artistic tradition.
“It’s one of the biggest references for everything that has to do with color in the movie, and also the simplification [of the art],” Mallade said.
Japanese animation also served as a visual reference during the movie’s production; Han said most of the team grew up during a time when the medium was popular in France, and described the film as a fusion between American, Disney-esque influences and those of Studio Ghibli and Hayao Miyazaki. Mallade, for her own part, describes live action filmmaking as her biggest inspiration, as it influenced the film’s cinematic framing and how she situated the “camera” to represent Amélie’s perspective.
During production, one of the biggest concerns for the team was representing Japan, and the book’s unique cultural mix between the country and Belgium. As Mallade put it, the Japan of the story is an idealized version of the real country, one seen through the precocious main character’s eyes, but they still wanted to pay attention to what Japan would have been like during the ’60s. Artistic director Eddine Noël did much of the research into the time period and the environment of the Kansai region in which the film is set, and built a replica of the house featured in the novel, and the team designed the house with Western furniture to represent the cultural fusion. Some areas, like a beach that plays a major role in the climax, are based on real places and drew from the plants and fish that are there in real life.
Although “Little Amélie” is a very grounded story of a girl’s coming-of-age, it contains several scenes in which the animators bent reality to represent Amélie’s point of view. Early in the film, she responds to the taste of a white Belgian chocolate bar as an almost nirvana-like awakening; when she experiences her first Spring, the flowers grow and expand into a limitless field. During the beach scene where she nearly drowns, the ocean parts for her in a symbolic moment. Han, who said the beach moment came from how he pictured the scene from the book as a kid, said these moments were intended to represent Amélie’s evolution, from a nearly mute baby in the beginning to a more mature girl by the end.
“We always tried to find some ideas that meet her emotional state,” Han told IndieWire. “You really feel that something happened to her brain, by connecting her neurons together, so she’s a bit more conscious about herself.”
Mallade described the process of putting the audience in the brain of Amélie as the most challenging part of making the entire film, as it was key to making the very simple story feel universal and emotionally resonant. Narration from Amélie, in which she conveyed her innocent worldview, helped to situate the audience in her perspective. As part of the process, Mallade and Han asked their team for memories they had from their childhood to pepper throughout the film. For example, a key scene where Amélie’s nanny Nishio creates and spins two tops, as a metaphor for their powerful soulmate connection, came from a memory a color artist offered. Mallade said these moments helped make the film both more specific and more universal, something that’s heavily rooted in its time and place while resonating with all audiences.
“We really want audiences to remember how things where when they were young, and that love can exist without barriers,” Mallade said. “Just remember the world when you were a kid, and you really cling to one’s memories.”
“Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” is now playing in theaters nationwide.
