Little Amélie: a tender and creative exploration of the formation of childhood identity
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain is as much about animation as an artform as it is an adaptation of Belgian author Amélie Northomb’s book The Character of Rain (2000).
The French animated feature, co-directed by Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han, makes sophisticated use of animation style to interrogate the formation of the self in early childhood.
The film begins with Amélie telling us that she began as a god – a tube-like god – before being born into a “vegetative” state as a baby girl. After a spectacular time-lapse montage, Amélie recounts awakening as a toddler in the Kansai region of Japan in 1969 when an earthquake shocks her into being. This is her first true memory of being in the world.
All of this is shown through multiple transformations staged within carefully controlled contrasting colour schemes. Characters move in and out of Amélie’s life with their own colour palettes that refract through their surroundings, reinforcing Amélie’s understanding of them.
So, when Amélie’s Belgian grandmother visits and awakens her further by feeding Amélie white Belgian chocolate, she does so while wearing a cream-coloured outfit. The chocolate glows when Amélie eats it, and an animalistic Amélie transforms into a glowing little girl. Colour becomes one of Little Amélie’s key pleasures, amplifying themes and character interactions alike.
The uses of such contrasting and reflective colour become central to the film’s storytelling, providing a narrative framework that mirrors Amélie’s comprehension of the world.
These careful uses of colour build in importance through a series of transformations and magical moments that illustrate Amélie’s emerging stages of selfhood. Amélie’s god-like powers persist as she affects her environment, whether mundanely blowing on the surface of a pond or magically parting the sea when her family goes to the beach. And Amélie is affected by her surroundings in turn, changing shape, size and at one point transforming into raindrops during a downpour.
More than this, Vallade and Han place Amélie at the visual centre of the film, positioning shots from her point of view and at her level. In doing so they allow audiences to spend time alongside Amélie, revisiting their own childhoods.
Amélie’s explorations of her world – running through her home, feeding carp, or playing with spinning tops – all bring us visually into her worldvieww. This alignment between us and the film’s little protagonist make her moments of existential turmoil all the more compelling, especially when she learns her family is to leave her haven in Japan to return to Belgium.
Such moments hint at the philosophy underpinning the film’s narrative. Amélie is aligned with not just rain, but also the natural world, echoing the work of animation greats like Hayao Miyazaki. But, even while Amélie finds refuge in nature, in her darkest moment she desires a return to its most primordial form.
Little Amélie is also about connections across cultures. The connection between Amélie and the world are most explicit when her family’s housekeeper, Nishio, teaches Amélie how to write her name in Japanese. Nishio explains “You are the rain”, and teaches Amélie that part of her name, “Amé”, means rain in Japanese. They write the symbol together in condensation on a windowpane. This act reveals to Amélie what she sees as an immediate, inherent connection to Japanese culture. But, as this sequence foreshadows, Amélie’s understanding of herself as Japanese is as tenuous and fleeting as her imagination of herself as a tube.
Culture takes on a negative hue when lingering wartime resentments cause conflict between the loving Nishio and the family’s cold landlady, Kashima. When Nishio explains how she lost her family during the second world war firebombing of Kobe, the carrots being dropped into stew transform into bombs dropping while the washing of rice stands in for Nishio’s experience of being buried by the explosion that killed her family.
It is Nishio, too, who guides Amélie into the lantern festival that is used to celebrate those lost in the war (much to Kashima’s angry dismay). Without schooling to guide her, Nishio becomes Amélie’s conduit into culture, expanding her world beyond the haven of home. Nishio and Amélie develop a shared experience and understanding of Japan in these moments, framed with beautiful seasonal Japanese gardens and traditional shrines as well as the family home. As a result, the film lingers on how our identities in childhood are a product of our connections.
Through the exaggeration and amplification of these connections, Vallade and Han’s Little Amélie produces a story that reaches for metaphysical heights, even as it remains true to the small scale and scope of Amélie’s childhood world. It is the character of the film’s animation – its shifting scales, uses of colour and predilection for transformation – that reveal Amélie to audiences, making her, not a god, but a guide back to our own childhood experiences of the world.
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Rayna Denison does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.