Final Rating: 1.5/5
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, directed by Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang, is a briskly paced, cute, animated movie that fails to leave much of an impression. Despite its uncommon watercolour artstyle making for beautiful promotional stills, the characters blend together within a shallow, inconsequential story.
Little Amélie centres around Amélie (Loïse Charpentier), a young Belgian girl growing up in Japan as the daughter of a diplomat. For the first two years of her life, Amélie is vegetative, unable to move, speak, or even react to the world around her. Suddenly, on her second birthday, Amélie springs to life, with enough energy to make up for lost time. Over the course of a year, Amélie learns to walk and talk, and experiences thrills and tragedies as her family’s time in Japan comes to a close.
Young audiences will see themselves in Little Amélie. When Amélie learns of her grandmother’s death, or asks her family’s maid about the war, young watchers might remember the first time they posed a difficult question. When Amélie goes swimming at the beach and her excitement at playing with a shell turns to fear after losing track of her family, kids might recall a time they got separated from their parents.
As a film for young viewers, Little Amélie is nice, but it’s not much more than that. Amélie’s family are undeveloped as characters, her brother and sister in particular being essentially indistinguishable from each other. The Japanese characters, while significantly more interesting than the Belgians, are relegated to painfully little screentime.
Both the family’s landlord and their maid lost their entire families during the Second World War and have built differing views on foreigners in the time since. But while an exploration of revenge vs. acceptance, xenophobia vs. tolerance could be interesting – even in the sidelines – it’s all contained within a few lines Amélie overhears while playing.
Amélie’s arc, too, overpromises and underdelivers. In the opening narration, Amélie refers to herself as a God, literally starting the film with the words “In the beginning, there was nothing.” Amélie eventually revises her stance to “I’m not God,” but that development feels less like a gradual softening and more like something forgotten about until it’s time to wrap up the arc.
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain is a decent children’s movie, but the best children’s movies work on multiple levels. Spirited Away is a great kids movie about relationships both real and exploitative, which also functions as a creative critique of capitalism. Toy Story addresses the fear of being replaced in a way that could apply to a new younger sibling, or an entire new generation. There are ideas in Little Amélie that are worth exploring, but Little Amélie is no Toy Story.
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain was seen during the 2025 Toronto International Film Festival. Thank you to GKIDS for the screener.
