Dur dur d'être bébé: "Little Amélie"

A dearth of prominent animations in 2025 has led our various academies to consider one or two leftfield options, to their credit and our benefit. The Cannes-endorsed Francophone charmer Little Amélie - which has been picked up by the Vue chain to show in both dubbed and subtitled options - proves altogether more philosophically inclined than all those imported half-term screenfillers called something like Dogs on a Train. Adapted from the author Amélie Nothomb's somewhat fantastical memoir Métaphysique des Tubes - a 2003 work so highfalutin its translation bore the Faber imprint - this is a very French, distinctly literary project: a young girl's attempt to get her head around human consciousness within the first three years of her existence. The movie opens more or less as Marty Supreme did, which is to say at the moment of conception; thereafter it charts young Amélie's formative years in Japan at the end of the 1960s and her efforts to comprehend how and why the world is as strange and wondrous as it is. If it contains any element of biographical truth - and that has been debated in the French book pages - it's that its heroine is a writer, or at least possessed of the writer's restless, curious mindset, from the off; here, she even gets to narrate her enquiries herself, giving the film an air of a more cerebral Look Who's Talking.

Behind it all is the not unreasonable idea that human life is kind of trippy when you stop to think about it. First you don't know what you are, then you do; you have no idea how to stand or walk or talk, and then you figure it out. (It seems an awful lot of hard work, and maybe it's no surprise some humans decide to stop developing beyond a certain point.) Where a Dogs on a Train might compel you to wonder why it is you bother to go on at all, Little Amélie seeks active engagement with how it is one lives and moves through the world: it's Left Bank Disney, with Sartre as its Baloo. The directors, Liane-Cho Han and Maïlys Vallade, work up a contrast between the classical elegance of their images (big eyes, bright, pleasing picturebook colours, more than a dash of Ghibli in the material details of this household) and the state of existential crisis and flux they seek to depict. Yet they capture a lot in passing: the florid wonders of a girl's first springtime (a particular balm amid the dreariest winter in living memory); an early lesson in the gendering of this universe, why boys get to do (and get away with) that which is forbidden to girls; the death that becomes a part of life the moment we're born into it. In some respects, Han and Vallade go PG-rated gently, restaging WW2 in a rice cooker and framing a last-reel suicide attempt as reverie; you can feel the book being softened here and there for easier, wider consumption. (The young Nothomb later spent time in Coventry, and I'd like to see these directors try something similar with an animated ringroad as a backdrop.) Yet the 77-minute running time is unimprovable: like childhood, Little Amélie flies by, and as with childhood, it imprints cherishable images on the inside walls of your cranium.

Little Amélie opens in cinemas nationwide from Friday.