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‘Little Amélie’ Review: A White Girl Raised in Japan Shares Her Unforgettable Worldview in Colorful French Cartoon
The team at Maybe Movies strikes a distinctive, minimalistic look in order to represent writer Amélie Northomb's formative years in Kobe.
As Nothomb remembers it, in those early years, she assumed the universe revolved around her, which makes “Little Amélie” (as the playful toon refers to its big-eyed, bobble-headed title character) a poetic look at the process by which a self-centered European girl born in a foreign land came to understand her place in society. For those keen on surrealistic Belgian reinterpretations of where kids come from, you could find more elegant models in Jaco Van Dormael’s “Toto the Hero” (the movie whose colorful style inspired that other “Amélie”) or “My Life in Pink,” a largely forgotten queer indie ahead of the curve on trans identity. Human faces are represented with as few as four colors, concentrating our attention on Amélie’s intense chartreuse eyes, while simply rendered backgrounds recall the work of artistic collaborator Remi Chayé (who pioneered the look on “Long Way North”) and David Hockney’s late-career iPad paintings.
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