Possibly the first bonafide coming-of-age movie about a two-year-old girl who learns her place in the world and how it works, Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” might operate on a similar emotional wavelength as recent genre classics like “Boyhood” or “Lady Bird,” but this animated bildungsroman — impressionistically adapted from an autobiographical novel by the Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb — feels as though it belongs to a different universe altogether.
For one thing, its chubby-cheeked namesake believes that she’s God. Or, begrudgingly, at least a god. Buddhist tradition holds that children are “of the gods” until the age of seven or so, when they make their transition into the mortal world, but something must have gotten lost in translation for the French-speaking Amélie, who was born to Belgian parents in the mountains of Japan toward the end of the 1960s. The youngest of three children, Amélie is so slow to develop that a doctor tells her parents that she’s a vegetable, and instructs them to place her in a protective bubble. “God did nothing, and was forgotten,” says her constant and precocious inner monologue (voiced by the older Loïse Charpentier).
And then, one fateful day, her visiting grandmother (Cathy Cerde as Claude) feeds Amélie a piece of Belgian white chocolate and the little girl erupts in a blaze of light like something out of “Dragonball Z.” From that point on, the former “vegetable” is a walking, talking vessel of wonder. And the movie around her — which is just as short, strange, and suspended between reality and imagination as its pint-sized heroine — is likewise open to the mysteries of the universe, as “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” blossoms into a uniquely childlike meditation on all of the beauty that life has to offer, and on all of the loss which makes that beauty worth cherishing while you can.
As anyone who’s ever had a two-year-old could tell you, kids that age don’t quite see things in such abstract terms. And yet, Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s borderline anthropomorphic film is so arresting for how beautifully it approximates a child’s experience of entering the world, and of realizing that it extends beyond the limits of their gaze. That it existed before they were born, and doesn’t revolve around any single one of us.
That awakening is both subject and story for “Little Amélie,” and yet it would be hard to imagine a less didactic approach to the lessons involved. Plotted like a series of ever-expanding bubbles, the movie is primarily driven by splendor more than anything else, and by the sheer joy of discovering what life has to offer for the first time. Amélie’s world is a feast for the senses, and the rotoscope-like style of the film’s digital animation — not performance-captured, but illustrated to make it look as though a soft and hyper-vivid filter has been placed over reality as we know it — transforms even the most ordinary kitchens or flower gardens into the stuff of core memories.
The girl’s massive green eyes constantly re-center the movie around the act of looking, and that focus — when combined with the overall aesthetic — has the added effect of making everything she encounters seem equally real. When Amélie imagines her mean older brother as a mindless carp sucking away at the surface of a pond, we understand that’s how she thinks of him in her mind’s eye. When she becomes convinced that her mother’s vacuum cleaner must also be a god (how else could it make things permanently disappear like that?), there’s no sense in doubting her conviction.
In the film’s most effective sequence, Amélie’s loving young housekeeper — a Japanese woman who’s either fluent in French for some reason or our first hint of the movie’s interchangeable approach to language — uses a rice cooker to explain the horror of the bombs that rained down on the country during the war, and to do so in a way that a (super-advanced) two-year-old might be able to understand. There isn’t so much as a hint of violence, and yet the image of grains being separated from each other amid the void of a closed pot offers a potent evocation of what it must be like to hear about and process such things for the first time.
Voiced by Victoria Grobois, Nishio-san will become Amélie’s best friend and most beloved teacher. The child’s world literally grows more fleshed out as a result of their time together, and while “Little Amélie” is rarely suspenseful or meaningfully story-driven, its visual progression from vague color splotches to Monet-like detail offers a compelling kind of plot development unto itself.
The film gets sadder as it goes along and forces Amélie to contend with a handful of uncomfortable realities (including the reasons why their Japanese landlord is so standoffish towards her foreign tenants, and the fact that Amélie’s family won’t be staying in the country forever), but it becomes more beautiful at exactly the same rate. Lasting only 71 minutes, or just a little bit longer than a sunshower, sunshower, “Little Amélie and the Character of Rain” isn’t a moment too short for its material, and yet its brevity allows it to maintain that delicate balance between joy and grief — discovery and heartache — from start to finish, and to use the sweet cocoon of childhood as a way of crystallizing how that dynamic grows with us as we get older. “Life is a great chomping mouth that spares nothing,” Amélie surmises at her lowest moment, but there’s oh so much to see between each bite.
Grade: B
“Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” screened at the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. GKIDS will release it in select theaters on Friday, October 31, and nationwide on Friday, November 7.
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