You could be forgiven for thinking Little Amélie is some sort of prequel to Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s delightfully French 2001 fantasy Amélie. Instead, this animated feature from Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han is delightfully French in a different kind of way, perfect for sensitive adults and sophisticated children who dream of wearing rollnecks, shades and berets and sipping black coffee in tiny cups at Les Deux Magots while arguing with each other about whether or not Miles Davis went downhill after splitting up with Juliette Greco. Philosophically, it was one of les plus françoises films in the selection in Cannes this year, and that means a lot when the main competition is Richard Linklater’s Nouvelle Vague, which practically arrived on a bicycle, festooned with onions.
On closer inspection, however, Little Amélie is a lot more nuanced than that, a fascinating multicultural mélange that’s rooted in two very different cultures, one almost entirely unseen. The subject is life and death, and it must surely be based on a very personal memoir by Amélie Nothomb, a writer from Belgium. That country also gave us Jacques Brel, and — much like that famously self-mythologising, existentialist balladeer — our heroine, Amélie, takes charge of her story right from her inception, recalling her curious birth and arrested infanthood, in which she was written off from the outset (“Your child is a vegetable,” a doctor tells her parents, as she watches impassively). Amélie’s mother and father, a musician and a diplomat, welcome her regardless, and she shares the family home with her much more boisterous brother and sister.
The setting shifts to Japan, and on a very specific date — 13 August 1969 — a minor earthquake causes Amélie to wake up from her locked-in state (“What happened that day remains a mystery,” she notes in voiceover). This miraculous awakening coincides with a visit from her twinkly eyed and rather boozy grandma, who introduces her to the delights of Belgian confectionery and gives her the rock-star attention she’s been craving. The little girl describes these events as tantamount to a rebirth: “I was born at the age of two-and-a-half in the Kansai mountains by the grace of white chocolate.”
The rest of the film stays with Amélie in the run-up to her third birthday, as she befriends the family nanny, Nishio-san, who introduces the little girl to various aspects of Japanese folklore, from its monsters to its rituals. In a most extraordinary piece of animation, Nishio-san even reflects on her harrowing experiences of the Second World War. Little Amélie is brutal in that respect, and the little girl’s fragility leads to a brace of uncompromising near-death experiences, both of which we see almost from a remove, as if Amélie is leaving her body, or perhaps remembering something she’s been told.
Add to that the fact that Amélie isn’t a particularly likeable child and you have an animation that fits right into the current awards cycle, where traditional big-budget studio animations are being rejected in favor of more bespoke, hand-made tales like last year’s winner Flow. It’s easy on the eye, like an Eric Rohmer film painted in pastel watercolors on blotting paper, but it cuts just as deep, revisiting still-painful Japanese wounds while also thinking on grief as a universal matter, using Amélie’s very astute observation that toddlers instinctively know everything and nothing when it comes to death.
Little Amélie leaves a lot open for interpretation and only explains the very strange beginning right at the end, which might be a test for less patient viewers. In that respect, it’s unlike anything else on the market right now, and serves as a reminder of how much better animation can be when it comes to handling the abstractions in our everyday lives.
Title: Little Amélie
Festival: Annecy Festival (Competition)
Directors: Maïlys Vallade, Liane-Cho Han
Screenwriters: Liane-Cho Han, Aude Py, Mailys Vallade, Eddine Noel
Voice cast: Loise Charpentier, Laetitia Coryn, Marc Arnaud, Cathy Cerda, Victoria Grobois, Yumi Fujimori
Sales: Goodfellas
Running time: 1 hr 18 mins
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