Little Amelie or the Character of Rain (2025)

PG mainly because I don't know if really young ones would like this movie.  This is a movie that deals with heavy themes without anything that is outright offensive.  There are themes of mortality, including the protagonist almost dying from slightly negligent parenting.  It gets a little anxiety inducing at times.  There are also themes of racial tension, mostly dealing with post-war fallout.  Also, the protagonist thinks she's God. Still, it is PG and appropriately so.

DIRECTORS: Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang and Mailys Vallade

Oh man, I'm going to have to deal with a little bit of sacrilege here.  We all know that KPop Demon Hunters is going to win.  It's an incredible movie that changed the way we thought about animation and how we consume streaming content.  We all learned a little bit about the studio system at the same time.  And, maybe I'm just projecting my limited worldview on this film, but I hadn't even heard of Little Amelie before really watching it.  But as good as KPop Demon Hunters is, golly, Little Amelie might be better.

It takes a minute to start to like it.  I mean, this movie is simply visually gorgeous from minute one.  But I take more than a pretty landscape or dynamic animation styles to get sold on a film.  Little Amelie dares you to like it in its first moments.  It's heady as heck.  It takes more than a minute to figure out the narrator's perspective on the whole event.  Even though, apparently, this movie is based on an autobiography, the film itself seems impossible.  The narrator speaks about herself in third person, but refers to herself as God.  Like, I don't know how that's going to land in the fly-over states.  (Note: I'm aware this is a French film.  If I knew that it was based on an autobiography, I certainly hoped that I would realize that this is not an American production.) A lot of it because the protagonist so odd.  I almost thought that the movie might even border on fantasy because, even though we witness Amelie's birth and growing up, none of it seems possible.  

I had a sitdown about writing when it came to studying memoirs with someone who had her memoir published.  (I just realized that I lead a charmed life.) I always assumed that autobiographies and memoirs were written almost with clarity first and foremost.  That's apparently not at all true.  If anything, a lot of the great memoirs out there frame the real world from a unique perspective.  It's not that they're lying or anything.  It's just that authors try balancing a tonal point-of-view while relating something that is fundamental to the author's life.  It's entertaining while creating an emotional resonance with something that seems untouchable.  It's not like Little Amelie is trying to trick its audience.  Instead, Amelie tells the story from her perspective.  She had an abnormal childhood and looked at the world differently than we do.  Yes, it's confusing for the viewer because we're getting conflicting information.  One of the first lines of the movie is a doctor informing Daniele that her daughter would be a vegetable.  When Amelie sits placid for two years without moving or speaking, it's in line with what the doctor told Daniele.  So when Amelie starts not only walking, but speaking in full complex sentences, that godhood seems to make sense in a way that makes us question whether this is an autobiography or fantasy.

I keep making this same stupid comparison, so please forgive me.  I really like when stories take the To Kill a Mockingbird format of storytelling.  There's something so innocent about all of it.  What I'm talking about is the fact that there is an adult narrator focusing on childhood.  But the story isn't necessarily about childhood.  In fact, it is about something quite deep and heavy.  But instead of making the movie about the deep and heavy thing, which often comes across as a sledgehammer of themes, the audience appreciates a sense of dramatic irony seeing adult themes through a child's eyes.  I can't diagnose Amelie.  There's something off about her.  As an avatar, she's actually hard to relate to because she is special.  Her unique insight into the world is fun to watch.  But there are a lot of moments that she's just a kid and that a lot of it can be chalked up to the universal growing up experience.  However, as much as this is about Amelie's childhood, this is a story of belonging in a place where you aren't supposed to belong, coupled with a heavy dose of forgiving something that really doesn't need to be forgiven.

As much as we bond with Amelie, this is more of a story of Nishio-san and Kashima-san and how different generations process trauma differently.  The easy answer to how Nishio-san and Kashima-san process the war could be written up to the fact that Kashima-san was older and lost people that she held onto differently.  It would be easy to say that Kashima-san took more trauma during the war.  Instead, I don' think that the movie lets Kashima-san off the hook so easily.  There's a talk where Nishio-san talks about being buried alive.  Because Amelie is so intense (I said I wouldn't diagnose her, but I can't ignore that there's something seemingly neurodivergent about her), Nishio-san must relive that moment of being buried and it is traumatizing.  But because Nishio-san was always open to forgiveness, that trauma comes across as oddly healing for her.  Instead, Kashima-san almost becomes a straight up villain in this piece that is oddly grounded for as weird as the movie gets.  When Amelie almost drowns for the second time (a situation that probably isn't normal, Mom and Dad!), she sees Kashima-san.  While it is Kashima-san that saves her, the reality that she has been presented is that Kashima-san is willing to let a gaijin child die because foreigners --as a collective unit --caused the death of her loved ones.  It's a heavy idea and it's much more interesting through the eyes of a child.

My wife kept getting stressed out by it because the parents were so hands off as parents.  If there is one thing to be said about Amelie, it's that she bonds with people who aren't her parents or her siblings.  Sure, there's an important moment where she acknowledges that Andre is her sibling.  But to say that she bonded with anyone biologically related to her is a fabrication.  Still, I wonder what the film is trying to imply about found family.  It's not that I don't understand stories where children find more love from a nanny than a biological parent.   It's not like I watch Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music and just go cross-eyed.  But the relationships that Amelie fosters in this movie are more about being treated as an equal, which is odd because Amelie still desires incredibly childish things.  It's just that the way that they speak to each other almost comes across as peers.  It's not just with Nishio-san.  The same holds true for her grandmother, who is her first understanding of death in the film.  If I keep coming back to To Kill a Mockingbird, that's probably what makes Scout so close to Atticus.  These are adult figures that understand that children have an innate need to be respected.  I question my role as a father with my children.  I'd like to think that I'm pulling this card with them.  But I also sometimes understand that sometimes that hugging these kids and getting them bowls of cereal is an act of love as powerful as showing a child a book of demons.  (I know that they aren't demons.  They just look demonic.) 

Golly, I cannot stress how beautiful this movie was.  Just to look at it, it becomes clear how next-level the animation is.  And it's a small story that hits hard.  I do love how Ghibli Kids picked this up for distribution because that is very on brand.