Little Amélie or the Character of Rain

Writers: Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang, Maïlys Vallade and Aude Py

Directors: Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang, Maïlys Vallade

Little Amélie is an enchanting animation set mostly in a glorious secret garden somewhere in rural Japan. Amélie herself is the infant narrator, the film brilliantly imagining the perspective of a two-year-old child. She may be too young to lay down memories, but the film explores the vividness of first experiences.

It’s a film with a pleasing philosophical core, based on writer Amélie Nothomb’s novella, La métaphysique des tubes. Amélie’s story explores what it feels like to experience who you are when you have no language to understand yourself. At two years old, Amélie is stubbornly non-verbal. Unable to express herself, she is gripped by frustrated rage. But an unexpected intervention by her visiting grandmother – it involves Belgian chocolate – suddenly opens the gates to language and a certain peace. To her parents’ disappointment, however, the first word Amélie articulates is “aspirateur,” the family’s vacuum cleaner being an object of the toddler’s devotion. In other words, notwithstanding the film’s thoughtful depths, it’s often very funny.

Visually, Amélie’s earliest experiences are depicted in pale pastel colours, images of blurry faces suggesting the baffling world of infancy. The more she understands the external world, the richer the colour palette. The scene in which the toddler consciously experiences her first spring is a fabulous riot of rainbow shades and exuberant movement. The garden, with its abundance of flowers and trees, streams and ponds, is to the child a sort of garden of Eden. And so it may seem to us too.

There are no snakes here, but family life is not always idyllic. Amélie’s older siblings, Juliette and André, squabble relentlessly and either ignore or bully the lonely child. She’s sharply sensitive to what’s going on, distressed to see her father crying at news of his mother’s death. This is the chocolate-bearing grandmère who Amélie learns to her horror will never come back to see her.

But a young Japanese woman, Nishio-san, arrives to help around the house, and she finds a language to connect to the little girl. She teaches her the Japanese character for rain, explaining that Amélie’s name contains its Japanese word, ‘ame’. Amélie later wants to know why boys are given a special month – the Month of the Carp – there is no equivalent for girls. So Nishio-san takes her to feed carp. As the fish gorge in a bubbling mass, Amélie imagines them as the gobbling faces of boys. It’s a lovely moment – both comic and psychologically perceptive.

Much quietly emerges. The story is set in the late 1960s, so when Amélie asks about war, she learns Nishio-san’s tragic history: all her family were killed in a bombing raid. We will later be let into the war-related secret of why the family’s landlady, Kashima-san, is so disapproving, not just of the Belgian family themselves, but of what she sees as Nishio-san’s treachery in teaching Amélie about Japanese culture. “Don’t waste your time on her,” she snaps. “Our cultures can’t mix.”

Little Amélie, in fact, is a wonderful celebration of an unexpected cultural encounter. Particularly moving, and visually stunning, is the scene in which Nishio-san takes the child down to the river to the Toro Nagashi ceremony to add their floating candle to the streams of candles in memory of the dead.

The film’s daring look at difficult subjects – of war, loss and death – means it avoids sentimentality. There is fear too, including a heart-stopping scene when Amélie is taken to the beach for the first time. Unobserved by the others, and thinking she has reached the ends of the earth, the little girl starts to wade into the rough waters.

The film is very different in tone and style from the masterpieces of Studio Ghibli. Little Amélie’s writers and directors, Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang, Maïlys Vallade, Aude Py, and artistic director Edinne Noël, have found a magical language of their own to create a believable and thought-provoking world of childhood. It’s no wonder that it has been short-listed for several forthcoming awards.

Little Amelie is released in cinemas on 13 February 2026.