Little Amélie review: A short and sweet animation
Little Amélie, also known as Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, has been nominated for Best Animated Feature at major awards shows like the Golden Globes, BAFTAs and Oscars. It’s always a delight to see a foreign-language underdog get into a category dominated by studio films and hopefully the nods will give this more attention.
Based on the 2000 autobiographical novel The Character of Rain by the well-known Belgian author Amélie Nothomb, Little Amélie follows a Belgian family living in 1960s Japan. The story is narrated by two-year-old Amélie (Loïse Charpentier for the narration, Emmylou Homs for other dialogue), who is different to her siblings and feels distant from her family. She forms a friendship and a close connection with their housekeeper Nishio-san (Victoria Grosbois) and prefers to spend her time with her rather than her own family.
It’s unusual for an autobiographical novel to serve as the source material for a family animated film, but it makes sense here because we’re seeing the world through a two-year-old’s eyes. The colourful hand-drawn animation brings to life Amélie’s sense of wonder at nature and gives the storytellers the freedom to express certain thoughts and feelings through surreal, fantastical scenes.
I struggled to get into Little Amélie at first because it’s really quite a weird movie. There is a lot of narration, with Amélie sharing her bizarre thoughts via voiceover – she thinks she’s God, she’s Japanese and she’s rain. It’s unusual! But I got more invested in the story as Amélie and Nishio-san’s friendship developed. Amélie prefers to help Nishio-san with chores and DIY instead of playing with her siblings because she treats her like an equal and teaches her things, while her family treat her like the baby child.
Little Amélie tells quite a simple story and is only an hour and 10 minutes but it deals with weightier themes than you might expect from a children’s film. For example, there are a couple of near-death encounters, and Nishio-san comes under fire for befriending Belgians, even though World War II was 30 years ago.
Little Amélie is a visually stunning film with a lovely score. The storytelling may be unusual and hard to get into at first, but it does a brilliant job of capturing a child’s wonder and the emotional truth of being foreigners in post-war Japan.
In cinemas from Friday 13th February