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<\/p>\nAt the tender age of two, Am\u00e9lie (voiced by Lo\u00efse Charpentier) \u2014 a Belgian girl living in rural Japan in the late 1960s \u2014 is roused from a vegetative state by a bar of white chocolate. Newly awakened to the world around her, the curious toddler, believing she\u2019s a god, explores life\u2019s joys and dangers.<\/p>\n
Loved, feared, obeyed, revered, and yet existing\u00a0almost entirely\u00a0beyond the comprehension of us mere mortals, what is a toddler if not a sort of pint-sized\u00a0god? In Japan, there is a belief that, until the age of three, a child more closely resembles the divine than the human. And in Oscar-nominated French animation\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie Or The Character Of Rain, Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang and Ma\u00eflys Vallade\u2019s hand-drawn adaptation of Am\u00e9lie\u00a0Nothomb\u2019s unconventional 2000 memoir, that belief is the animating force driving a rapturous 78-minute exploration of the world \u2014 in all its infinite beauty and unfathomable terror \u2014 as seen through the eyes of one such child deity.<\/p>\n
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As you\u00a0might\u00a0have\u00a0guessed, Kuang and Vallade\u2019s movie is not exactly your average\u00a0Bildungsroman. At its core,\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u00a0is a story about a Belgian child (that\u2019d\u00a0be Am\u00e9lie, voiced by\u00a0Lo\u00efse\u00a0Charpentier) living in\u00a01960s Japan. Having spent the first two years of her life in a vegetative state,\u00a0Am\u00e9lie\u00a0finds herself awakened to the world by an earthquake, and then to her\u00a0apparent\u00a0godliness by a bite of grandma-gifted white Belgian chocolate. As her mother, father, and siblings marvel at Am\u00e9lie\u2019s sudden eloquence and observational acuity, the precocious toddler \u2014\u00a0hand-in-hand\u00a0with doting nanny Nishio-san\u00a0(Victoria\u00a0Grosbois),\u00a0shadowed by\u00a0Mrs\u00a0Danvers-like\u00a0landlady\u00a0Kashima-san(Yumi Fujimori) \u2014 dives into her new existence with wide, wonder-filled eyes.<\/p>\n
Even when the film does touch darkness […] there\u2019s an abiding softness to\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u2019s line-light animation, an authentically child-like internal logic\u00a0guiding\u00a0the writing, that shines through.<\/p>\n
Through vivid,\u00a0watercolour-style 2D animation,\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u00a0visualizes\u00a0the malleability of childhood memory in its form while celebrating the tangible magic of childhood in its content. While there\u00a0is\u00a0no shortage of films\u00a0about\u00a0being a child out there, few capture the experience quite\u00a0like this one. Whether we\u2019re witnessing Am\u00e9lie\u2019s slack-jawed discovery of \u201cdisappearing machines\u201d (vacuum cleaners),\u00a0marvelling\u00a0alongside her at the flowers blossoming in her family\u2019s Edenic garden, or seeing star-like lanterns glow at\u00a0Nishio-san\u2019s\u00a0side, the movie\u2019s bright pastel palette and painterly soft edges invite us to reconnect with the innocence of youth \u2014 to recall a life unburdened by age and experience. Even when our mini deity\u2019s more Old Testament inclinations surface, as in her comical disdain for carp and her brother Andr\u00e9 (Isaac\u00a0Schoumsky),\u00a0it\u2019s\u00a0fun to remember what it was\u00a0like\u00a0to be\u00a0furious\u00a0at trivial things.<\/p>\n
For some, the movie\u2019s overwhelming commitment to its own joie de vivre and unapologetically sentimental streak may come off as twee. But\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u2019s world \u2014 shaped, as\u00a0with all gods, in her own image \u2014\u00a0isn\u2019t\u00a0all sunshine and rainbows. Rather, when the film\u00a0does\u00a0touch darkness \u2014 as in narrative episodes where Am\u00e9lie encounters grief, questions death, and is confronted with how World War II continues to haunt her Nishio-san\u00a0and Kashima-san\u00a0\u2014 there\u2019s an abiding softness to\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u2019s line-light animation, an authentically child-like internal logic\u00a0guiding\u00a0the writing, that shines through. A scene in which Nishio-san\u00a0explains the horrors of bombing raids to Am\u00e9lie via a rice cooker, familial separation crudely but accessibly\u00a0symbolised\u00a0in violently parted grains, is a real stand-out.<\/p>\n
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Perhaps part\u00a0of the key to the success of\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u2019s tonal balancing act is its embrace on a foundational level of its East-meets-West positioning. Kuang and Vallade\u2019s\u00a0previous\u00a0work in the art departments of French animated offerings\u00a0The Little Prince,\u00a0The Illusionist<\/a>, Long Way North, and\u00a0I\u00a0Lost My Body<\/a>\u00a0guide their aesthetic sensibility towards the\u00a0Impressionists and Monet. The movie\u2019s rural Japanese setting, narrative elasticity, and magical-realist approach to youth and memory,\u00a0though? Well,\u00a0that is where the influences of Hayao Miyazaki\u2019s\u00a0My\u00a0Neighbour\u00a0Totoro<\/a> (there’s more than a touch of Totoro’s Mei in the similarly strong-willed Am\u00e9lie), Isao Takahata\u2019s My\u00a0Neighbours\u00a0The\u00a0Yamadas\u00a0and Only Yesterday<\/a>, and Mamoru Hosoda\u2019s\u00a0Mirai<\/a>\u00a0can be most keenly felt.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0in the nooks and crannies between these myriad points of reference\u00a0that\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u00a0moves,\u00a0however, and\u00a0to thrilling\u00a0effect.<\/p>\n The\u00a0film\u00a0builds at its own leisurely, lilting pace,\u00a0ultimately towards\u00a0a life-changing event in our young\u00a0hero\u2019s\u00a0life: her third birthday. Three is an age, explains our infinitely wise narrator, where \u201cyou see everything and understand nothing\u201d.\u00a0It\u2019s\u00a0an age, too, where the\u00a0realisation\u00a0dawns upon Am\u00e9lie that while she may not in fact be God after all, she is most assuredly, emphatically, and uniquely human \u2014 just like her beloved Nishio-san. And what is that,\u00a0Little Am\u00e9lie\u00a0contends\u00a0and its little Am\u00e9lie embodies, if not divine?<\/p>\n A beautifully hand-crafted love letter to childhood, self-discovery, and the life-changing power of really good chocolate, Little Am\u00e9lie is 78 minutes of pure animated joy that welcomes one and all.\u202f<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"At the tender age of two, Am\u00e9lie (voiced by Lo\u00efse Charpentier) \u2014 a Belgian girl living in rural…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":296799,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[27],"tags":[93,61,60,270],"class_list":["post-296798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-movies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296798","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=296798"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/296798\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/296799"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=296798"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=296798"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=296798"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}