Stop us if you’ve heard this one – a charming, uniquely told foreign animated feature premieres at Cannes before heading to the Annecy International Animation Film Festival. It becomes acquired by a prestige distributor and as the year progresses, it becomes a critical darling and, soon enough, an awards powerhouse.
This was the trajectory of “Flow,” which ultimately won the 2025 Best Animated Feature Oscar (a historic upset for the category) and became a new favorite. And it could soon be the trajectory of “Little Amélie,” an astoundingly wonderful animated feature that debuted at Cannes earlier this year and is playing at Annecy right now, before being released by GKids later this year. It’s certainly good enough.
The feature, based on the novel “The Character of Rain” by Belgian author Amélie Nothomb, follows the title character as she narrates her entire life, even from the womb. When she’s born, she’s stuck in a vegetative state — not coma-bound, exactly, but statuesque — and her two older siblings greet her with confusion and distance. Her parents, a diplomat and piano whiz, remain hopeful that one day she’ll snap out of it, emerging, as it were, from her cocoon. And one day, when Amélie is around 2, she does.
At this point, the family has moved from Belgium to Japan for her father’s work. It’s July 1969 and it’s in this new and unexpected setting that the true Amélie emerges – following in a long line of precocious, hyper-aware child characters who also maintain that innocence and fragility. (It’s easy to think of everyone from Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer to Harriet Cleve Dufresnes, the main character of Donna Tartt’s wonderful “The Little Friend.”) Part of this awakening had to do with a visit from her paternal grandmother, who blessed her with self-confidence and Belgian white chocolate, and another with her relationship to Nishio-san, a Japanese woman whom the family hires to help look after the house, but who takes a special interest in young Amélie.
“Little Amélie” is breathtakingly beautiful, the kind of film with a deep well of humanity and whose images and emotions, working overtime and always in concert, are occasionally overwhelming. Watching the movie and seeing Amélie navigate through her life, glimpsing everything through her perspective, is deeply moving, particularly when combined with the movie’s transcendent visuals. So many movies have a problem of perspective, where we are watching it from the point-of-view of a single character, only to have that clarity and that narrative purity broken by some clumsy switch to another character. The power is often diluted. This is not the case with “Little Amélie,” particularly with her narration. In the womb, she thinks of herself – and often refers to herself as a god – but throughout the movie, we see that understanding change. She is not a god. She was trapped, for years, in amber. And now she is human. She is little Amélie.
What makes “Little Amélie” even more astounding is that it was directed by a pair of debut feature filmmakers – Maïlys Vallade (a layout and storyboard artist on the similarly transfixing “I Lost My Body”) and Liane-Cho Han (animation director on “Calamity”), who also co-wrote the screenplay with Aude Py and art director Eddine Noël. This marks the arrival of some truly talented filmmakers, who in just 75 minutes have created something unique and inspiring. It’s unlike anything you’ve probably ever seen before, but the movie is so open-hearted and welcoming that it’s like revisiting an old friend. You just want to stay with “Little Amélie” as long as you can, luxuriating in the movie’s deliberate rhythm and deep emotion. You can’t, of course. But you sure want to.
The animation style of “Little Amélie” certainly reinforces everything that is happening with the story. The movie opens with bold colors, pinks and greens, as Amélie talks to the audience from the womb. The art style is, initially, deliberately abstract. It’s a way of making sure that you are connecting with the feeling of the story before anything actually happens. And then when the movie begins, in earnest, it takes on a truly unique look, equal parts painterly and like something out of a children’s book illustration. It’s unclear how, exactly, this style was achieved, but Han has referenced everything from comic books to video games in interviews and he worked on Mark Osborne’s “The Little Prince,” an animated film that is similarly soulful.
It’s a style that works perfectly for a story told from the eyes of a child – there’s something simplified about it, but it also can be gently surreal. There’s a moment when Amélie, after being told that her name means “rain,” is stuck in a storm. As the raindrops come down, she imagines herself in every drop and the animation gives us just that – droplets that fall, in slow motion, made up of Amélie. It’s a stirring, dreamlike moment, one of a handful in the movie that will absolutely make you catch your breath. And it’s the kind of thing that could only be captured in animation this assured and confident.
Whether or not “Little Amélie” follows the same trajectory as “Flow,” to become a tiny movie that can contend with the major players, is obviously unknown. But in terms of depth of feeling and emotional artistry, it should certainly be viewed alongside bigger studio productions. She might be small, but she is mighty.
