WeAnimate 2026-04-08 | wam#0075

Little Amélie or The Character of Rain was one of the most celebrated animated features of  2025, winning the Audience Award at Annecy and securing nominations at the Annies, Cannes, Golden Globes, and the Academy Awards.

It’s a remarkable film, based on the semi-autobiographical novel The Character of Rain by Amélie Nothomb. We recently spoke with Little Amélie’s co-writer and co-director Liane-Cho Han about the film, his work in animation, and his life in Denmark.

WA: In another interview, you mentioned that you first read The Character of Rain at 19, and have wanted to make it into a movie ever since then. Tell us more about that.

Liane-Cho Han: Yes, it’s true that I read the book like 23 years ago, when I was 19. At that time, I wasn’t really a bookworm; I was more into pop culture, like Japanese animation and video games, but I was so moved by this book. The story of a 2 year old Belgian girl, born in Japan, who believed she was God… what a crazy concept! I was really amazed at the idea, and her relationship with Nishio-san was so moving. I remember having tears in my eyes at the end, and that was the first time that had happened to me. And of course it was set in Japan, a country and a culture that I really loved, and set in post WWII… Three years before this book, I had discovered an animated movie called Grave of the Fireflies, and when I saw it I was just shocked, and I cried for a couple of hours, I was so moved by it. So when I read this book I thought it had all the ingredients to make a wonderful animated film. And why an animated film? Why animation? Because in the book, during the beach sequence, Amélie walks on the water like Jesus, but I thought, even then, that she should part the sea like Moses instead.

Of course at that time making the movie was just a dream, a fantasy, and I thought it would never happen. But then a lot of years passed, and I gained a lot of experience in the industry. I started to work with Maïlys Vallade [co-writer and co-director of Little Amélie or The Character of Rain] 14 years ago on a movie called The Little Prince by Mark Osborne. We were both junior storyboarders, and our head of story was Bob Persichetti, who is now one of the directors of the Spiderverse films, so it was an amazing way to start as a storyboarder. Later on we collaborated a lot with our friend the french director Rémi Chayé on the movies Long Way North and Calamity, where we were both storyboarders, and I was later an animation supervisor. Maïlys and I worked on those films with Rémi and most of our artistic family, including Eddine Noël, our co-screenwriter and also our production designer. It was all the beginning of a big collaboration, and once we were a team I started to feel like it was time to do the Amélie project.

We know these other transitions from a child to a teenager, from a teenager to adulthood, from adulthood to midlife crisis, to pensioner… but this first transition is actually very hard for us, because we are just little children. It also hasn’t been treated very often in movies, in animation or in movies in general, so we felt that we should try to move forward with the adaptation. And of course it has all these great, mature themes that Maïlys and I love, because we grew up with Japanese animation, which always has very mature themes. You can watch Japanese movies that speak to all ages, the young as well as the old, and that was definitely the kind of movie we wanted to do.

So I wrote a letter to the author, Amélie Nothomb, without really believing that she would actually answer, and we pitched it to some producers, and everyone was very positive. We didn’t get an answer from the author, but we got a reply from the book editor, and they were very excited about the project. From that moment actually everything went pretty smoothly, at least in terms of the rights and the financials and stuff.

WA: Did you work with the author on the script?

Liane-Cho Han: Actually, no. Amélie Nothomb usually says something like “My books are my children, and adaptations of my books are my grandchildren, and I never interfere with the education of my grandchildren.” So she just let us be totally free. So free, in fact, that it was the opposite, and she didn’t interfere at all, even though we sometimes asked. We requested some pictures, extra information, that kind of thing, but she didn’t want to be involved at all, so we had to find it on our own. We sourced material from the internet. There was a great documentary in 2005, Amélie Nothomb: une vie entre deux eaux, where they filmed her going back to Japan after so many years, going back to where she grew up, and at the very end of the documentary she meets Nishio-san again for the first time after all those years. It was a very moving moment, because of course Nishio-san was then very very old. In the documentary you can also see some pictures from the past, and our production designer was actually able to find where the house was by using the documentary and then Google maps.

So we didn’t have any help at all from the author. She discovered the movie at the very end, during the last day of final mixing. We had a big screening with all the partners and the book author and editors and everything. We actually made two versions of the credits: one said “adapted from” the book, and the other said “inspired by” the book, so if she liked it we could call it an adaptation, and if she didn’t we could say it was inspired by. But she loved it, and she was very moved. She had lost her father a few years before, and she said that we had revived her father for her. During that screening we actually didn’t know that she had lost both of her parents, so of course for her it was very emotional, and she said it was the best adaptation of any of her books.

Our movie talks about universal themes, like acceptance. Accepting that everything is ephemeral, that everything has an end. And that, despite the challenges we meet in life, like disillusion or even death, life is still worth living. We should open ourselves to the world, rather than being closed to the world because we are scared of suffering, or too angry to let go. It’s also about empathy, that maybe empathy for kids can help to solve even the worst conflicts. And I’m saying that because the message in the book is totally opposite. The last line of the book is “After three years of age, nothing happened.” It’s like the author is stuck in the happiness she had as a baby, and nothing was worth living for after that.

But of course we couldn’t communicate that kind of message to the audience, especially to young ones, which is why we made those changes. Especially Kashima-san, who has a very different role in the book than in the movie. In the book she’s pure evil, at least from Amélie’s point of view, and the author let her die in the end. But we love nuances in characters, and if you think of Miyazaki’s movies, there are no evil characters: there’s always an explanation, always a nuance.

All those things: disillusion, acceptance, can be experienced by children but also as adults, so both ages can see and understand these feelings.

WA: As you mention, Little Amélie does have very mature themes. Who was the audience for the film?

Liane-Cho Han: We really wanted to make a film that could reach both targets: the very youngest and the very oldest. Because the book is for adults, of course, and even though it is talking about early childhood and it can seem a bit naive, the themes are very strong themes, and there are some graphic moments, much more graphic than the movie. So we wanted to make a movie for both ages, and, as I said, people have different opinions about what a kid can handle. But we believe that kids can understand more than we think; we just have to find the right approach for those things. Of course movies today have to be targeted to a very specific age, and it was very hard sometimes to convince people that it would work. But then you go to some of the screenings, which are full of kids, and they love the movie. There are 3 or 4 year old kids, which personally I think is pretty young to go to the cinema, but they are just amazed and entranced, because of the colors and the images. And of course all the kids won’t understand all the information, all the layers of meaning, and maybe they won’t understand the concepts and situations of WWII, but that’s the beauty of a movie: you can rewatch and watch it later and understand different layers of it, and the adults understand the different layers as well.

In the movie there is a voice over, and the role of the voice over was firstly to create structure in general, but also to offer a different point of view about what we are seeing in the image. It’s a step to the side to see a different angle, and of course sometimes the voice over is using complicated words, because we tried as much as possible to use the beautiful writing style and humor of the book author. And maybe the kids won’t understand it in an intellectual way, but they can feel the rhythm of the voice and not really have a problem with it, which is what we see at the screenings. Sometimes I watch a movie that was made in a different language, and I don’t understand it, but the images, the rhythm… it carries you.

WA: The character animation is very realistic. Did you use your own kids as reference?

LCH: Absolutely. We also tried to remember our own childhoods as well, because, while memories can be a bit blurry, there is always an emotion, a sensation that remains in your mind. So we asked the whole team for some of their memories, and Simon Dumonceau had a very specific memory of a spinning top made of lychees cut in two, so we used that in the movie. I also remembered how sometimes when I was a kid my parents argued because of money, and as a kid of course you don’t understand those things, but you feel the tension and it stays inside of you… We did that in the movie too, when the two Japanese women argue, and of course Amélie doesn’t understand because she never learned about the war.

As I mentioned my child was very difficult, and this movie made me think about how to approach early childhood, you know? I come from France, with a Chinese background, and the way we treat children is very different from Denmark. We are very confrontational, full of conflict, saying No! No! and scolding. And my wife has a very different approach, to distract, to move the child’s attitude to something else. The left part of the brain and the right part of the brain start to connect, from about 2 years old until about 7, so of course a child’s brain works very differently from ours. So no matter how you scold them when they are small, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t make them scared. You have to be creative instead. I learned a lot from this movie, and I hope that other people can see it as well. So we referenced our own children a lot, but also our own memories.

WA: I’ve read that you used an Adobe Animate pipeline on the film, where storyboard images could just eventually be used as frames in the film. Where did that workflow come from?

LCH: The pipeline comes from Rémi Chayé on Long Way North. We have worked in Flash/Animate ever since, on Long Way North and Calamity and now Amélie, even though of course after every movie the pipeline evolves a bit. It was a style without outlines, a style that Maïlys and I like, because it suits our drawing style, which is more sculptural, painterly. And of course I love Animate. For me, it is the best animation software in the world. But to use it you need people who make scripts for you. You can’t ask Adobe for anything: they won’t do anything for you. They already tried to close it down and discontinue the software, but then they realized that there was a huge community who insisted they keep it. We don’t need technical support or anything, just keep it going. So yes, it was a pipeline that we had already.

For Amélie it was a bit different, of course, because it was a different story. It was about childhood, so we wanted more warmth, rounded shapes and rounded characters, and it’s a bit more realistic as well. You can see the texture around the characters, and it’s a bit more intense, pastel texture compared to the previous movies. We also added a lot of blur/focus/out of focus effects, because we are looking through the gaze of this little girl, and sometimes she can be very close to things, to have some macro shots, and we used a lot of transparency as well. So it’s similar to the other two films, but also different as well, because this is a different movie and we are different directors. But the pipeline does come from those other two movies, so huge thanks to Mr. Chayé.

WA: You keep the camera mostly at Amélie’s point of view, which creates a lot of very exaggerated perspective shots, which then transition into kind of fantastic scale shots in the film…

LCH: Which makes sense, right? Because when you are a kid, you believe things are so huge. Like the garden, which we tried to make into this enormous, unlimited garden, but of course when you come back in a few years you realize that things weren’t that big at all. So we tried to mimic that in the film. Also keeping the camera at her eye level as much as possible, to see the world from her point of view, which has to do with camera placement. But we’re also trying to capture the sensation when she touches something, when she breathes… also with the colors and the lighting, we tried to really follow her emotional states. When she was just born, the light was very over-exposed and very bright, because that’s how you see when you are just born and the light is too strong. But of course when she starts to discover the beauty of the world, the colors are much brighter, more saturated. And later, when her world collapses underneath her feet, of course the colors become more dull and toned down. And then back again to very bright at the end of the movie. And we did a lot with the sound as well, so that we really feel like we are in her point of view.

We also follow the seasons, because the movie takes place over the course of one year, so she comes out into the view of the world in spring, and then the world collapses under her in the fall, and there are also nice bright lights in winter… so we go through these transitions.

Our production designer Eddine Noël also came up with the idea of having one color palette per character. For example, Amélie is green because of her eyes, and Nishio-san is the warm yellow of the sun, and Kashima-san is purple, the color of the aristocracy, and each member of the family has their own color. And when she loses her bearings and her world collapses, all those colors change, so we push even more the idea that she’s disoriented.

WA:On a personal note, did you always want to be an animator?

LCH: I don’t think I wanted to be an animator at the beginning. As I mentioned, I grew up with Japanese animation, but also with video games, and I think that at the beginning I wanted to work in video games. And people said that then you have to learn to draw, so I started to draw very late. When I was 18, after I got my bachelor’s, I was trying to figure out what to do, should I be an engineer, or work in computers or something… But my sister was already doing some magazines for manga and stuff, already quite popular, even though she’s 7 years younger than I am. And I thought, “Oh, that’s what I want to do – I want to draw!”

So I went to drawing school, and I still had no idea what animation was. I wasn’t great at drawing, because I started so late, and it wasn’t natural. But after a few years I went to an evening animation course, in some basement in Paris with the sewers and everything, and it was taught by this old French Vietnamese guy who talked to us about animation, and I could feel… You know how when you are drawing for animation, and it’s a bit rough, you are just drawing to feel the movement.

When working as a storyboarder, Maïlys and I are the kind of storyboarders who don’t just focus on our own sequence. We want to think about the whole movie, thinking about how to enhance character arcs and build the story over the whole film. And we write as well, so for Amélie we wrote the script. So I started with animation, but really it was about communicating emotions through story.

WA: And what brought you to Denmark?

LCH: I am in Denmark because when I was working on Long Way North, it was a co-production between France and Denmark. I was a storyboarder and animation director on that film, and I had been working for three years in a row without any holidays or breaks at all. I had also had a breakup after 10 years of a relationship, so I had really focused on work. By the time we were almost at the end of production, I was getting burnt out, and I couldn’t take a holiday because we were still in the very rushed part of production. So I suggested to Rémi that I should work a bit more closely with the Danish team. I thought a trip to Denmark would feel a bit like a holiday. He said “Yes, great idea – let’s send you there!”

So the first place I went was to Viborg, to see Nørlum, and that’s how I met my now-wife. I was there for just a few days, but we made a connection, and when I went back to France we kept in touch. After the movie was finished I went back to Denmark to see her again… and that’s how it all started. I fell in love with a Danish woman and started my life in Denmark and now we have a son together. There was a lot of back-and-forth in the beginning when we lived in both countries, but when it was time for our son to start school we thought we needed to be a bit more stable. So we settled down in a city called Aarhus. It’s a beautiful place.

WA: In a previous interview, you mentioned the value of simplicity, of focusing on the essentials, which sounds a lot like the Danish animation philosophy. Is that consistent with your approach to filmmaking?

LCH: As you mentioned, we’ve done a lot of coproductions, and the movies I’ve worked on with Maïlys and Rémi, they aren’t very high budget movies compared to big studio films. So we need to place the camera, to storyboard, in a way that ensures that it doesn’t cost too much. But we are also very inspired by Japanese animation, and in Japanese animation they have a way of expressing the most with the least. We also love close up shots, or playing with the sound. Sometimes using sound can be stronger than actually showing the action, so of course we are trying to do that. Sometimes with the constraints you can actually communicate more emotion than actually showing everything you want. And that’s what we love to do, and why it’s great to do storyboarding in Adobe Animate. Because we know that everything we create is going to be moved into production, so we always try to choose the right angle and make good decisions, because we know how much it costs to do redrawing, to change shots.

WA: And what’s next for you? Will you take some time to relax?

LCH: Unfortunately, or fortunately, no, there’s not much time to relax. It’s actually very exciting. Right now I am working on Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s next film, as a storyboarder and also as an animation director. It’s my first Danish job, on a Danish movie with a Danish director. It happens that the studio is in Aarhus, so that’s very convenient for me, and I don’t have to go back to work in the basement; I can finally just bike to a studio. It’s a great movie, it’s an adult movie, and it’s the first time I’ve worked on a very adult movie, so that’s great.

And of course in parallel I have a new project. It’s very different from Amélie, although it’s also an adaptation. It’s an adaptation of The Clan of the Cave Bear, by Jean M. Auel, and it’s set in prehistoric time. I am working on adapting it as an animated TV series for young adults. Because, as I mentioned, I discovered Grave of the Fireflies when I was 15 or 16, and I also discovered Princess Mononoke around that time. I watched Princess Mononoke 12 times in one week. Same thing with Grave of the Fireflies: I watched it 6 times in one week. At that age, you are mature enough to deviate from your parent’s tastes, to develop your own opinion about what you want to watch, but you are still a bit immature, because you haven’t experienced much of life. So everything you see that strikes you is really impactful: it builds your personality and identity into the future. I was not the same person after those movies. I could feel it. I could feel how it changed the course of my whole personality, and changed my vision of the world.

I read The Clan of the Cave Bear when I was actually much older, just a few years ago. And you know at my age it’s really hard to impress me, because I have seen, watched, felt a lot of things, but when I read this book, I felt that same strong emotion from when I was 16. It really struck me inside of my core, so I felt really strongly that I need to try to adapt this into animation.

WA: Do you see it in your head?

LCH: Absolutely. I read a lot of books, like Foundation by Isaac Asimov, for example, and I love that series and his Robot series. I love reading it, I love the story. But when I read those books, I just can’t see it. For some reason, maybe it’s individual, because everyone has a vision of a book while they are reading it, but I had this connection with The Clan of the Cave Bear, and I could see all these pictures and scenes and situations, so it felt very natural for me to want to adapt it.

I hope this adaptation will also help people have a new observation, a new perspective on who we are as a species. Because we are capable of the best as well as the worst. And people sometimes say that we are an invasive species, but all the species are invasive: the ants, the bacteria, the mushrooms. But we have something which is very different.

Today we forget all that. We think that if we want shampoo we just have to go buy it at the supermarket. But everything comes from something, everything has an origin in nature… so for this project I would like to help people understand that again. You see all these movies about some catastrophe in the future, about war between two civilizations, and there’s always an enemy, always someone to fight. But for this project I would like to think of us as a species, because we are all coming as a species. When we arrived in Europe and met this other human species that had lived there for more than 400,000 years, they went extinct because of our species. So I think about us, you know, about what we are. It’s fascinating, and something I would like to explore in this project.

WA: So you’re on a mission to change the world, one movie at a time?

LCH: [laughs] I don’t know if you can change the world. That’s just how the world is. Of course it’s the very beginning of the project and things can always go wrong, so for now let’s see how it goes. so let’s see what happens.