{"id":250910,"date":"2025-10-30T21:25:09","date_gmt":"2025-10-30T21:25:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/250910\/"},"modified":"2025-10-30T21:25:09","modified_gmt":"2025-10-30T21:25:09","slug":"little-amelie-or-the-character-of-rain-review-threenage-magic","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/250910\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Am\u00e9lie Or The Character Of Rain review: Threenage magic"},"content":{"rendered":"

Sure, there are things that you learn after age three. How to drive. The history of the printing press. Geometry. But the important topics, those covered in the endearingly bright animated biopic Little Am\u00e9lie Or The Character Of Rain, they can all solidify inside you as a toddler. What you\u2019re curious about in life, your personality, your attitudes towards authority (whether as tangible as your parents or existential as God), and even your identity\u2014these formative qualities take root early for Am\u00e9lie, a Belgian girl born and raised in Japan. They also take root after a few years of so little activity that her doctors describe her as vegetative, a plant whose roots were never going to grow. Defying that diagnosis is just the first small miracle of Little Am\u00e9lie. Based on Am\u00e9lie Nothomb\u2019s autofiction<\/a> The Character Of Rain, the animated film from directors Ma\u00eflys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is both a fantastical memoir and precocious coming-of-age story that doesn\u2019t need to venture past threenage.<\/p>\n

After two years of nothing but observation\u2014no movement, no babbling, no screaming, no crying\u2014Am\u00e9lie (Lo\u00efse Charpentier) awakens from stasis all at once, inspired into action by her visiting grandmother\u2019s white chocolate (the least believable thing in the entire narrative). Before she begins sprinting around and speaking in relatively eloquent French, though, she\u2019s just\u2026there. In voiceover, she describes how this sublime stillness is like nirvana, something holy and powerful and divinely detached.\u00a0<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not as pretentious as it sounds, though it\u2019s often as whimsical as the more famous Am\u00e9lie. Its script ties these lofty self-centered ideas to sillier childhood ones: Am\u00e9lie (and God, in her imagination) is really just a tube. Food goes in. Waste comes out. There\u2019s no intention, just constant processing. The same kind of limits are imposed upon Am\u00e9lie\u2019s conception of the world during a riveting scene in which she discusses death with her affectionate nanny, Nishio-san (Victoria Grosbois). Nishio-san describes her memories of World War II while cooking, sifting through rice as she recalls being buried alive by debris from the bombs. Each traumatic image is filtered through food prep, visualizing the struggle of a toddler to comprehend something so large and terrible.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s just one way in which Little Am\u00e9lie Or The Character Of Rain evokes the experience of its central child. From the pure abstraction of its opening springs a digital impressionism, where vivid blocks of colors and simple lines turn everyday objects into magical curiosities, painting Am\u00e9lie\u2019s life across fields and beaches and her family\u2019s home. The cluttered, vibrant environments pop with the same focus as those moving through them; the massive eyes of the characters are there not to look at each other, but take in everything around them. There\u2019s a reason Am\u00e9lie\u2019s first words aren\u2019t \u201cmama\u201d or \u201cdaddy\u201d but \u201cvacuum cleaner.\u201d She\u2019s more interested in the world than her family, her mother or father or siblings. It\u2019s endearingly specific; scenes sprawl out and blend together like the liquid memories of childhood, with her relatives only really standing out in the few moments where their strong emotions arm-wrestle those of Am\u00e9lie. The exceptions are the people who treat her like the god her baby-brain believes her to be, notably her doting grandmother (Cathy Cerd\u00e0) and nurturing Nishio-san.<\/p>\n

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Despite using her relationship with her Japanese caretaker to explore the lingering darkness of war, and the long tail of suspicion and resentment it casts behind it, Little Am\u00e9lie strains against the limits of a story about a little white girl\u2019s relationship with her non-white nanny. But the other life-altering memories that persist from toddlerhood balance the story accordingly; being torn between Japan and Belgium pales to being torn between life and death (even if it all adds up into a vaguely Buddhist worldview). Am\u00e9lie\u2019s more impetuous personal struggles, her hopeless tantrums and foolish choices, give the film some thematic and age-specific distance from those of Studio Ghibli<\/a>. Going head to head with that animation house around stories about post-war Japan is a losing proposition, but Little Am\u00e9lie submerges itself in fantastical ecstasy and melancholy with a magic all its own.<\/p>\n

A brief 71 minutes, Little Am\u00e9lie Or The Character Of Rain passes by in a blink, just like the few months of life it covers for its central tyke. And it doesn\u2019t need more than that to make an impact. Its warm-hued, confident style, as bold and lovely as a headstrong child\u2019s drawing, empowers Nothomb\u2019s recollections of an early life spent already caught by the tides. Countless other films cover youth\u2019s first brushes with death, with self-definition, with the limits of our powers. Few tackle them all at once, and from such a recognizable developmental headspace. And Nothomb\u2019s book never moves past that age, because \u201cAfter that, nothing more happened.\u201d Nothing that mattered that much in the grand scheme of things, anyway.<\/p>\n

Director: Ma\u00eflys Vallade, Liane-Cho Han
Writer: Liane-Cho Han, Aude Py, Ma\u00eflys Vallade, Eddine No\u00ebl
Starring: Lo\u00efse Charpentier, Victoria Grosbois, Yumi Fujimori, Cathy Cerd\u00e0, Marc Arnaud, Laetitia Coryn
Release Date: October 31, 2025<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Sure, there are things that you learn after age three. How to drive. The history of the printing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":250911,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[49,48,75,337],"class_list":["post-250910","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-ca","tag-canada","tag-entertainment","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250910","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=250910"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/250910\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/250911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=250910"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=250910"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=250910"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}