{"id":146904,"date":"2025-09-10T16:25:08","date_gmt":"2025-09-10T16:25:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/146904\/"},"modified":"2025-09-10T16:25:08","modified_gmt":"2025-09-10T16:25:08","slug":"little-amelie-or-the-character-of-rain-review-a-small-animated-wonder","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/146904\/","title":{"rendered":"Little Am\u00e9lie or the Character of Rain Review: A Small Animated Wonder"},"content":{"rendered":"

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, Ma\u00eflys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han\u2019s \u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie or the Character of Rain<\/a>\u201d might operate on a similar emotional wavelength as recent genre classics like \u201cBoyhood<\/a>\u201d or \u201cLady Bird,<\/a>\u201d but this animated bildungsroman \u2014 impressionistically adapted from an autobiographical novel by the Belgian novelist Am\u00e9lie Nothomb \u2014\u00a0feels as though it belongs to a different universe altogether.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For one thing, its chubby-cheeked namesake believes that she\u2019s God<\/a>. Or, begrudgingly, at least a god. Buddhist tradition holds that children are \u201cof the gods\u201d 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 Am\u00e9lie, who was born to Belgian parents in the mountains of Japan toward the end of the 1960s. The youngest of three children, Am\u00e9lie is so slow to develop that a doctor tells her parents that she\u2019s a vegetable, and instructs them to place her in a protective bubble. \u201cGod did nothing, and was forgotten,\u201d says her constant and precocious inner monologue (voiced by the older Lo\u00efse Charpentier).\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"'Demon<\/a> \"'Wayward,'<\/a> <\/p>\n

And then, one fateful day, her visiting grandmother (Cathy Cerde as Claude) feeds Am\u00e9lie a piece of Belgian white chocolate and the little girl erupts in a blaze of light like something out of \u201cDragonball Z.\u201d From that point on, the former \u201cvegetable\u201d is a walking, talking vessel of wonder. And the movie around her \u2014 which is just as short, strange, and suspended between reality and imagination as its pint-sized heroine \u2014 is likewise open to the mysteries of the universe, as \u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie or the Character of Rain\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

As anyone who\u2019s ever had a two-year-old could tell you, kids that age don\u2019t quite see things in such abstract terms. And yet, Vallade and Liane-Cho Han\u2019s borderline anthropomorphic film<\/a> is so arresting for how beautifully it approximates a child\u2019s 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\u2019t revolve around any single one of us.\u00a0<\/p>\n<\/p>\n

That awakening is both subject and story for \u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie,\u201d 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. Am\u00e9lie\u2019s world is a feast for the senses, and the rotoscope-like style of the film\u2019s digital animation \u2014 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 \u2014\u00a0transforms even the most ordinary kitchens or flower gardens into the stuff of core memories.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The girl\u2019s massive green eyes constantly re-center the movie around the act of looking, and that focus \u2014\u00a0when combined with the overall aesthetic \u2014 has the added effect of making everything she encounters seem equally real. When Am\u00e9lie imagines her mean older brother as a mindless carp sucking away at the surface of a pond, we understand that\u2019s how she thinks of him in her mind\u2019s eye. When she becomes convinced that her mother\u2019s vacuum cleaner must also be a god (how else could it make things permanently disappear like that?), there\u2019s no sense in doubting her conviction.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In the film\u2019s most effective sequence, Am\u00e9lie\u2019s loving young housekeeper \u2014\u00a0a Japanese woman who\u2019s either fluent in French for some reason or our first hint of the movie\u2019s interchangeable approach to language \u2014\u00a0uses 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\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Voiced by Victoria Grobois, Nishio-san will become Am\u00e9lie\u2019s best friend and most beloved teacher. The child\u2019s world literally grows more fleshed out as a result of their time together, and while \u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie\u201d 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The film gets sadder as it goes along and forces Am\u00e9lie 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 Am\u00e9lie\u2019s family won\u2019t 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, \u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie and the Character of Rain\u201d isn\u2019t a moment too short for its material, and yet its brevity allows it to maintain that delicate balance between joy and grief \u2014\u00a0discovery and heartache \u2014\u00a0from 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. \u201cLife is a great chomping mouth that spares nothing,\u201d Am\u00e9lie surmises at her lowest moment, but there\u2019s oh so much to see between each bite.<\/p>\n

Grade: B<\/p>\n

\u201cLittle Am\u00e9lie or the Character of Rain\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Want to stay up to date on IndieWire\u2019s film\u00a0reviews<\/a>\u00a0and critical thoughts?\u00a0Subscribe here<\/a>\u00a0to our newly launched newsletter, In Review by David Ehrlich, in which our Chief Film Critic and Head Reviews Editor rounds up the best new reviews and streaming picks along with some exclusive musings \u2014\u00a0all only available to subscribers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Possibly the first bonafide coming-of-age movie about a two-year-old girl who learns her place in the world and…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":146905,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[52],"tags":[88,2695,91038,206,900,46686],"class_list":["post-146904","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-movies","tag-entertainment","tag-film","tag-little-amu00e9lie-or-the-character-of-rain","tag-movies","tag-reviews","tag-tiff"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146904","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=146904"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/146904\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/146905"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=146904"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=146904"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=146904"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}