With the 79th British Academy Film Awards around the corner, our young persons' correspondent Senan Jennings takes a look at the dark depths of imagination in Little Amélie.
Little Amélie or The Shape of Rain is a beautifully animated film about a young girl from a Belgian family living in Japan in the late 1960s. Based on an autobiography by Amélie Nothomb, the film has won over 45 awards, including the Grand Jury Prize at the 2025 Animation Is Film Festival and Audience Awards at Annecy and San Sebastián. Little Amélie also received a nomination for Best Animated Feature at the 98th Academy Awards and is up for Best Animated Film and Best Children's & Family Film at next Sunday's BAFTAs.
Two-and-a-half-year-old Amélie (Loïse Charpentier) has a fantastical and imaginative view of the world. Dismissively labelled as being in a vegetative state by a doctor, Amélie believes herself to be a god and sees miracles and angels in every little thing of life. A vacuum cleaner becomes an inexplicable, divine force of destruction. White chocolate becomes a blessing of serenity and an awakening to the beauty of the world. Pots of soup and rice become warzones, all building a dense atmosphere that perfectly emulates the vivid imagery fuelled by the unrelenting curiosity of young children. But the film is not all play and lightness. Set in post-war Japan, when most of the adult generation were young when the first bombs landed on Pearl Harbour, Amélie’s curiosity leads her to confront the aftermath of this violence.
Oftentimes, the boundaries between what is real and what is imagined are blurred beyond recognition. The frame-by-frame animation is unfaltering in its beauty, and I would challenge viewers to find a single moment where the emotion of the scene it is in is not accurately conveyed. The film’s aesthetic is elevated brilliantly by the beauty of the Japanese landscapes, the sequences where Amélie’s mind runs wild and the tenser, more emotional beats towards the end of the film. The soundtrack blends something almost reminiscent of Western classical music with traditional Japanese instrumentation in a way that underpins the depth of the narrative.
Directors Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang and Maïlys Vallade cover so narrative ground all at once, but the one core theme of the film is the bond, that deeply held trust between a child and the parental figures in their life. Amélie engages with the adults of the film much more than she does with the other children. She becomes attached to this motherly figure in her life, and this friendship between the two, and their various conversations about the everyday marvels of the world, Japanese culture and deeper truths that would scare or upset most children her age. Yet Amélie approaches with a logical, almost stoic mindset, seeing everything in her life that confuses her as issues that demand solving.
A classic coming-of-age story, Little Amélie (Shape of Rain) is vivid, thrilling and mesmerising - a perfect watch for anyone looking for something with depth, that's touching, or simply something that makes you think.
Little Amélie is nominated for Best Animated film at the BAFTAs, which will be held on 22nd February 2026.