Little Amélie

Liane-Cho Han Jin Kuang and Maïlys Vallade's Little Amélie (Little Amélie ou la métaphysique du Métabief) was selected for a special screening at Cannes 2025. The film is an animated adaptation of Amélie Nothomb's autobiographical novel Métaphysique des tubes, Nothomb being one of the most internationally exported contemporary Belgian-French writers, with substantial readership across continental European languages.

The film follows the early childhood of a Belgian diplomat's daughter growing up in 1970s Japan, based directly on Nothomb's actual childhood in the Kansai region of Japan, where her father served as a Belgian diplomatic representative. The film is told through the central character's solemn, funny, metaphysical stare at the world, the recurring visual conceit being that the very young Amélie observes everything through what she experiences as a kind of philosophical witness-position rather than as a participant in the family's daily life.

The animation register (hand-drawn 2D, with substantial use of negative space and simplified character design) is among the most distinctive recent independent-animation styles, drawing on the broader contemporary Franco-Belgian animation tradition (Sylvain Chomet, Folivari, The SPA Studios). The film operates simultaneously as autobiographical-children's-coming-of-age, intercultural document of European-Japanese 1970s diplomatic-family life, and quietly serious philosophical exercise in the kind of register that Nothomb's adult novels have continued to refine across her career.