Presumably the primary bonafide coming-of-age film a couple of two-year-old lady who learns her place on the earth and the way it works, Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” would possibly function on the same emotional wavelength as current style classics like “Boyhood” or “Girl Chicken,” however this animated bildungsroman — impressionistically tailored from an autobiographical novel by the Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb — feels as if it belongs to a distinct universe altogether.
For one factor, its chubby-cheeked namesake believes that she’s God. Or, begrudgingly, at the very least a god. Buddhist custom holds that youngsters are “of the gods” till the age of seven or so, once they make their transition into the mortal world, however one thing should have gotten misplaced in translation for the French-speaking Amélie, who was born to Belgian mother and father within the mountains of Japan towards the tip of the Sixties. The youngest of three youngsters, Amélie is so sluggish to develop that a physician tells her mother and father that she’s a vegetable, and instructs them to position her in a protecting bubble. “God did nothing, and was forgotten,” says her fixed and precocious inside monologue (voiced by the older Loïse Charpentier).
After which, one fateful day, her visiting grandmother (Cathy Cerde as Claude) feeds Amélie a bit of Belgian white chocolate and the little lady erupts in a blaze of sunshine like one thing out of “Dragonball Z.” From that time on, the previous “vegetable” is a strolling, speaking vessel of marvel. And the film round her — which is simply as quick, unusual, and suspended between actuality and creativeness as its pint-sized heroine — is likewise open to the mysteries of the universe, as “Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” blossoms right into a uniquely childlike meditation on the entire magnificence that life has to supply, and on the entire loss which makes that magnificence value cherishing when you can.
As anybody who’s ever had a two-year-old might inform you, youngsters that age don’t fairly see issues in such summary phrases. And but, Vallade and Liane-Cho Han’s borderline anthropomorphic movie is so arresting for a way fantastically it approximates a baby’s expertise of getting into the world, and of realizing that it extends past the bounds of their gaze. That it existed earlier than they have been born, and doesn’t revolve round any single considered one of us.
That awakening is each topic and story for “Little Amélie,” and but it will be laborious to think about a much less didactic method to the teachings concerned. Plotted like a collection of ever-expanding bubbles, the film is primarily pushed by splendor greater than the rest, and by the sheer pleasure of discovering what life has to supply for the primary time. Amélie’s world is a feast for the senses, and the rotoscope-like type of the movie’s digital animation — not performance-captured, however illustrated to make it look as if a gentle and hyper-vivid filter has been positioned over actuality as we all know it — transforms even probably the most unusual kitchens or flower gardens into the stuff of core reminiscences.
The lady’s large inexperienced eyes continually re-center the film across the act of trying, and that focus — when mixed with the general aesthetic — has the added impact of creating every part she encounters appear equally actual. When Amélie imagines her imply older brother as a senseless carp sucking away on the floor of a pond, we perceive that’s how she thinks of him in her thoughts’s eye. When she turns into satisfied that her mom’s vacuum cleaner should even be a god (how else might it make issues completely disappear like that?), there’s no sense in doubting her conviction.
Within the movie’s handiest sequence, Amélie’s loving younger housekeeper — a Japanese lady who’s both fluent in French for some cause or our first trace of the film’s interchangeable method to language — makes use of a rice cooker to elucidate the horror of the bombs that rained down on the nation in the course of the struggle, and to take action in a means {that a} (super-advanced) two-year-old would possibly have the ability to perceive. There isn’t a lot as a touch of violence, and but the picture of grains being separated from one another amid the void of a closed pot presents a potent evocation of what it should be like to listen to about and course of such issues for the primary time.
Voiced by Victoria Grobois, Nishio-san will turn into Amélie’s finest good friend and most beloved trainer. The kid’s world actually grows extra fleshed out because of their time collectively, and whereas “Little Amélie” is never suspenseful or meaningfully story-driven, its visible development from imprecise coloration splotches to Monet-like element presents a compelling type of plot growth unto itself.
The movie will get sadder because it goes alongside and forces Amélie to cope with a handful of uncomfortable realities (together with the the reason why their Japanese landlord is so standoffish in the direction of her international tenants, and the truth that Amélie’s household received’t be staying within the nation ceaselessly), however it turns into extra stunning at precisely the identical charge. Lasting solely 71 minutes, or just a bit bit longer than a sunshower, sunshower, “Little Amélie and the Character of Rain” isn’t a second too quick for its materials, and but its brevity permits it to keep up that delicate steadiness between pleasure and grief — discovery and heartache — from begin to end, and to make use of the candy cocoon of childhood as a means of crystallizing how that dynamic grows with us as we become old. “Life is a good chomping mouth that spares nothing,” Amélie surmises at her lowest second, however there’s oh a lot to see between every chew.
Grade: B
“Little Amélie or the Character of Rain” screened on the 2025 Toronto Worldwide Movie Pageant. GKIDS will launch it in choose theaters on Friday, October 31, and nationwide on Friday, November 7.
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