Cannes 2025: Animated Movie ‘Little Amélie’ is a Wonderful Delight
by Alex Billington
May 22, 2025
In the last few years, the Cannes Film Festival continues to discover amazing little animation films that hide within the line-up. I’m always glad to stumble across them and enjoy them and talk about them even when few others seem to be taking the time to watch any of them here. Little Amélie is 2025’s most wonderful animation discovery – playing in the Special Screenings section at the festival this summer. Made in France, Little Amélie is absolutely sensational. It left me in awe – and it’s only 75 minutes long. Japan’s animation maestro Hayao Miyazaki would love this film. It’s precisely the kind of heartfelt little story he enjoys telling – a mesmerizing, vibrant, magical story of a 3 year old girl exploring the world for the first time while living in Japan. Her experiences with nature and animals and her family and her Japanese caretaker and the world around her are perfectly visualized in a unique animation style. I need to rave about this one – it’s a delight.
Little Amelie is co-directed by two filmmakers: Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang (animator on The Illusionist, Long Way North, Ethel & Ernest, Calamity a Childhood of Martha Jane Cannary) and Mailys Vallade (of The Lighthouse Keeper short & an artist on Calamity a Childhood of Martha Jane Cannary). The original French title is Amélie et la métaphysique des tubes, which translates directly to Amélie and the Metaphysics of Tubes (a reference to the philosophy of growing up). The alternative English title is Little Amélie or the Character of Rain, though it’s best known as just Little Amélie. One of my favorite parts of this film is when her caretaker teaches Ame how to write her name as a Japanese symbol, which is also the very same symbol for “rain”. The film follows a Belgium family that moves to Japan. They have two kids already, a boy and a girl, and the mother gives birth to another young girl. She’s inert until two-and-a-half-years-old when she suddenly awakens. It’s narrated with her voice from her POV as she describes how she gets to experience the world and everything in it for the first time. He real awakening begins when her granny brings her a piece of decadent white chocolate from Belgium & she tries white chocolate for the first time, which melts her mind.
The animation is beautiful even if it doesn’t seem so at first glance – a flat vector 2D style that becomes truly stunning with perfectly crafted animation that makes it all feel real. It’s so colorful and so entrancing. There are a couple of scenes which are so beautiful I almost got tears in my eyes because of how ravishing it looks. The story is one of the most vivid examples of how vitally important this time is in the life of human beings growing up. The way her narration explains how all of these first-time discoveries mean something to her are a reminder that children need good, meaningful, wholesome experiences when they’re very young and growing up. There’s also a sensitive connection between Amélie and her Japanese caretaker named Nishio-San, which is also essential to her growth as a human being. She needs this person to see her for who she really is, to treat her as a real person, to allow her to grow and experience all of this with complete freedom. This is the core of what the film is really about, a refreshing reminder that we need to let the world dazzle us, we need to discover all its beauty with our own eyes, with someone there to watch over us. We need to let kids grow up surrounded by warmth and love and complete comfort. And a few bites of white chocolate, too.
Alex’s Cannes 2025 Rating: 9 out of 10
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