.

Recently I’ve been thinking about being three years old. 

Not me, my daughter. 

She recently went on a trip to New York with her school which inevitably brought back memories of the time we all went as a family thirteen years ago, when she was three. 

Except it didn’t, not for her. She was three so she doesn’t have those memories anymore. For the rest of us this was a huge time in our lives; an expensive family trip to the East coast of America visiting one of the most incredible cities in the world. In fact for all of us, she had an amazing experience; she loved Central Park, she danced around the Metropolitan Museum of Art, got excited by the library lions, pointed enthusiastically at every picture of the Statue of Liberty (and then eventually the real Statue of Liberty) and couldn’t believe it when she was allowed to have just ice cream for lunch in Dylan’s Candy Bar. For her though all of that has gone and that made me a little sad. I mean, she’s alright, she’s just been back and we’ll always have Paris, but it did bring home how our early life experiences don’t stay with us. Time does heal but it also steals. 

It is interesting that at a time when all of this was already on my mind, this film comes out. Little Amélie is essentially all about the experience of being three; how everything is new and where transient things have huge importance, where you have no concept of a future that will totally eclipse your present and where your immediate world is your whole world. It’s lovely but it is also a little bittersweet. 

Little Amélie is a hand drawn animation from France, adapted closely from the Belgian book The Character of Rain from 2000. The novel, by Amélie Nothomb, purports to be autobiographical but for reasons explored above, it of course can’t be. As an animated film this will appeal to a young audience but it has a wider audience in mind as with recent films like last year’s Flow and Robot Dreams, it deals with bigger issues than the Minions. Like those movies it has also been nominated for Best Animated Feature at the Oscars and in the same way that Flow (another low budget international film) beat out Inside Out 2 and The Wild Robot (which to be fair were also more sophisticated than the Minions) this might in turn snatch victory from Zootropolis 2 and K-pop Demon Hunters.

There is also quite a lot of Studio Ghibli in the mix here, partly because it is set in rural Japan, but also in how it explores everything from a child’s point of view and finds both beauty and ugliness in the simplest things (there are some grotesque fish that feel like they have straight swum up from the ocean in Ponyo or the bath house in Spirited Away). While the animation has its own style, eschewing traditional outlines and using lots of pastel colour, it also has the painterly style of the famous Japanese animation house.

There is more to discuss here, including the alarming lax parenting on display and one frightening choice that the toddler protagonist seems to make at the end when faced with some loss, but it is best left to be discovered in a viewing of the movie. My recommendation is that you do seek out the opportunity; Little Amélie is a beautiful and profound film that I’m sure will feature in my top ten at the end of the year. 

I’m going to take my daughter, and I’m pleased that this is something she will remember.