Perhaps the first Bonafide Age movie about a two-year-old girl who learns her place in the world and how it works, Maïlys embankments and Liane-Cho Han’s “Little Amélie or the character of the rain“Can work on a similar emotional wavelength as the latest genre classics like”Childhood“Or”Lady Bird,“But this animated Education novel – Impressionistically adapted from an autobiographical novel by Belgian novelist Amélie Nothomb – feels as if it belongs to another universe completely.
For one thing, its chubby cheekly names believe she is God. Or, at least, at least a God. Buddhist tradition believes that children are “by the gods” until the age of seven, when they make their transition to the deadly world, but something must have been lost in translation for the French-speaking Amélie, born to Belgian parents in the mountains in Japan by the end of the 1960s. The youngest of three children, Amélie is so slow to develop that a doctor tells her parents that she is a vegetable and instructs them to place her in a protective bubble. “God did nothing and was forgotten,” says her constant and older inner monologue (expressed by the older Loïse -Charpentier).
And then, a fateful day, her visiting grandmother (Cathy Cerde as Claude) feeds Amélie a piece of Belgian white chocolate and the little girl breaks out in a light burning like any of “Dragonball Z.” From that point, the former “vegetable” is a walking, talking vessel. And the movie around her is as short, strange and suspended between reality and imagination as its pinted heroine-is also open to the mysteries of the universe, such as “Little Amélie or the character of rain” blooms to a unique childish meditation on all the beauty that life has to offer, and on all the loss that makes beauty worth doing it.
As anyone who has ever had a two -year -old could tell you that the kids don’t quite See things in such abstract terms. And yet, rolled and liane-cho man’s borderline anthropomorphic film Am so arrested about how beautiful it approximates a child’s experience of entering the world and realizing that it extends beyond the boundaries of their gaze. That it existed before they were born and did not revolve around any of us.
The awakening is both subject and story for “Little Amélie”, and yet it would be difficult to imagine a less didactic attitude to the lessons involved. Plotted as a series of ever -growing bubbles, the film is mainly driven by splendor more than anything else and by the great joy of discovering what life has to offer for the first time. Amélie’s World is a party for the senses, and the rotoscope-like style of the film’s digital animation-not performance captured, but illustrated to make it look as if a soft and hyper-living filter has been placed over the reality that we know to transform into and with the most common cuisine or flower gardens.
The girl’s huge green eyes are constantly centering the film around the film and the focus-in combination with the overall aesthetics-has the extra effect of everything she meets seems equally real. When Amélie imagines her meaningful older brother as an insane carp who sucks away at the surface of a pond, we understand that this is how she thinks of him in her mind. When she becomes convinced that her mother’s vacuum cleaner must also be a God (how else can it make things permanent to disappear that way?), There is no sense to doubt her conviction.
In the film’s most effective sequence, Amélie’s loving young housekeeper uses Japanese woman who is either fluent French for some reason or our first hint of the film’s interchangeable attitude to the language-a rice pisema to explain the horror of the bombs that rained down the country during the war and to do so in a way as a (super-administered) two-year-old can understand. There is not as much as a hint of violence, and yet offers the image of barley separated from each other in the middle of the void from a closed pot a potent evocation of how it must be to hear about and process such things for the first time.
Nishio-San is expressed by Victoria Grobois and will be Amélie’s best friend and most loved teacher. The child’s world literally grows more wiped out as a result of its time together, and while “Little Amélie” is rarely exciting or meaningful history driven, its visual development from vague color shooters to monet -like detail offers a convincing type of plot development to itself.
The film becomes more sad when it goes and forces Amélie to fight with a handful of uncomfortable realities (including the reasons why their Japanese landlord is so constant against their foreign tenants, and the fact that Amélie’s family will not stay in the country forever), but it will be more beautiful at exactly the same pace. Lasting Only 71 minutes, or just a little bit Longer than a sunshower, Sunshower, “Little Amélie and the Character of Rain” isn not a moment too short for its material, and Yet its Brevity Dairs it to Maintain that DELAFE BETWEEN BETWEEN JOY Finish, and to use the sweet cocoon of childhood as a way of crystallizing how that dynamic grows with us as we get older. “Life is a big chomping mouth that doesn’t spare nothing,” assumes Amélie at her lowest moment, but there is oh so much to see between each bite.
Rating: B.
“Little Amélie or the nature of rain” was shown at the Toronto International Film Festival 2025. Gkids will release it in selected theaters on Friday 31 October and all over the country on Friday 7 November.
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