Maïlys Vallade and Liane-Cho Han are the first time directors and co-writers of the Cannes sensation Little Amélie or The Character of Rain. The animated film won the Audience Award at the 2025 Annecy International Animation festival, and it’s easy to see why. Audiences have gravitated toward the beautiful animation, very complex lead character, and complex concepts about death and the many levels of grief. Here, in an interview with The Contending, Vallade and Han talk about their process in fashioning such a fascinating work of art from Amélie Nothomb’s acclaimed novel “The Character of Rain.” Future audiences have something special in store for them as Little Amélie rolls out over in the United States this weekend.
Vallade and Han certainly created something unique and special and cannot wait to share it with you.
The Contending: Amélie is a fascinating character. She comes across initially as very egotistical, then she evolves into a normal little kid who is very empathic. You also question if she is really magical, or if she is just seeing things this way. What was she like to write and to direct?
Maïlys Vallade: Yes, she was a difficult character to write, to create a good balance between the empathy that we can have for her, but also the antipathy we could also feel for her, potentially. In the book, she describes herself as a god in the beginning, but it’s a very paradoxical god that is not a creative god. We realized it was important to develop her as a character through which things happened too. So we had to balance how much audio of her was there through the voiceover. If there was too much of it, it would become stifling and could make her unsympathetic. But if there was too little then we lost a lot of insight into her. So we chose to build her character as very mature in her mind, but also was very naive in her evolution. In her perception, she does have magical power because we’re really in her gaze, hence the way she feels things and perceives them.
Liane-Cho Han: It was a big challenge to tell the trajectory, about this girl who believes she’s in the center of the universe until she understands that, no, she’s actually part of it. And how she sees all the beauty of the world through these naive eyes. Especially through Japan in this particular moment of post-World War II when there is such tension. That she could learn to transition from thinking that she’s in the center of the universe to understanding that, no, she’s actually part of it, and should open herself to the world and not be just in herself was an interesting journey to take with her.
The Contending: One part I was really impressed with is that you have this gorgeous animation, but we never lose Amélie. She is always at the center, we never get distracted by the things around her. What kind of challenges did that create in your animation to make certain we always knew where she was while still keeping everything around her so engaging?
Maïlys Vallade: It helped that we knew we were going to see everything through her perception and her point of view. That was the driving direction of the whole project, starting with adapting from the book. We had to take things out, but we wanted the theme of death to be present for thematic necessity overall. But mostly so we could focus on the relationship between Nisha-san and Amélie, which was at the core of the film.
So, in order to keep Amélie at the center of everything, we had to make sure that other characters, like her parents and siblings, were very seldom on screen, yet still make sure that we could see them quickly when they did appear. So with Edinne Noël, the co-script writer and artistic director, we decided to associate one color to each character, so you can really spot them throughout the story. That also allowed us at the end to mix all these colors together creating a great confusing moment.
Liane-Cho Han: One thing that connects Maïlys and me since we started working together is that we love to place the camera with the character to capture the character’s point of view. We feel that the audience gains empathy for the character that way, not just how we see things through her eyes but also little things like how she touches the floor or her face. Even the colors change depending on her emotional state. So that was very important, that everything was illustrating her perception, like the garden, which seems limitless. But when she starts to become disillusioned but also starts to grow up the colors become a bit more dull and subdued and the garden becomes smaller. That’s what connects Maïlys and me. We love that kind of thing, to be with the character in their emotions but not going over the top with it.
The Contending: So many people have commented on how beautiful the animation is. That it looks like an impressionist painting and that there are no lines on the characters. I agree, it’s completely and utterly gorgeous. How did you guys decide upon that for the style for this film?
Maïlys Vallade: We both worked for many years with Rémi Chayé as did Edinne Noël and many others on the team for this film, who inspired the look of the film. And since my student movie days I’ve always used that technique of no outlines for the characters. We like to work from the inside of the silhouette of the character, rather than from the outside. It’s a kind of sculptural way of doing it. so we can have color blocks between the characters in the background that merge the lights on them. Because when we do that it creates a realistic but simplified appearance. We also work a lot with motifs. I work with gouache a lot and we have a team of planner painters who use photoshop, that work almost instinctively to create little touches to help create the look.
Liane-Cho Han: And of course, we love the texture on the outside, this pastel texture that vibrates. It really brings this naive illustration that brings a lot to the theme of early childhood. Then there’s also another very important reason, it is more economical. Because we have worked with this style for many, many years, we developed this pipeline with a team who knows this system super well. The animation is a mix of cutout and traditional animation; we use pictorial software called Adobe Animator that also helps us out a lot. So it’s a way for us to be efficient and let us then spend more of our budget on story.
Maïlys Vallade: As well as allowing the surroundings to express her naivety or her grief, with little touches of color. We can also play. We focus better when there is no outline and It feels much more photographic.
The Contending: An entire scene that I thought was just gorgeous from the get-go is the cooking scene with Nishio-san. She described the war to us using the act of cooking, and sounds as if it’s a way to let us experience that horror, but not really see it. Then we cut from that to the tops on the table that becomes this intimate, connective scene for Nishio-san and Amélie. Anything you can say about creating those two scenes? I’d love to hear.
Maïlys Vallade: I’m going to start with the spinning tops. We asked the members of our team what memories from childhood that they could conjure that would help us really bring out that nostalgia. Then one of our colorists mentioned this childhood experience of having these little spinning tops and, in the book, there’s only one spinning top. But it was really incredible to have the idea of the two spinning tops, because when they moved together, they really symbolized the relationship between the two soulmates of Nishio-san and Amélie.
Liane-Cho Han: Then with the war of course, this movie is dealing with very difficult things, like death and grief, and this post-World War II theme. But we are not Japanese, we do not have the same history. And it was very important that since we have their story, and also because it was from a child’s point of view, that we had to show as much respect as possible to a story that we didn’t live.
While the book is very graphic, we didn’t want to do that for the reasons said, but we also didn’t want it to be too simple and make it seem unimportant. It is very important, especially for Nishio-san, to tell this story since it is hers. So there was a lot of debate and to be honest it was not easy. We needed to respect this intimacy, when she’s telling the story, and not minimize the violence of it. So we didn’t use real war sound effects but we did use more enhanced sound to push a bit more the feeling of what she has felt.
Maïlys Vallade: Having Nisha-san in the kitchen was great for this story, because we don’t need to have flashbacks for this. It was ideal to use her normal working to get the feelings across. It was a very challenging balance with little Amélie asking some very problematic questions. She wants to know more about the war, but in the book she is very aggressive. Nishio-san talks about the bodies of her family, and Amélie just wants to know more and more and more. So we really wanted to balance her naivety with her wanting to learn more.
Little Amélie or the Character of Rain releases in theaters nationwide this Friday, November 7.
