Film Analysis

Amelie

Synopsis: "Amélie is a story about a girl named Amélie whose childhood was suppressed by her Father's mistaken concerns of a heart defect. With these concerns Amélie gets hardly any real life contact with other people. This leads Amélie to resort to her own fantastical world and dreams of love and beauty. She later on becomes a young woman and moves to the central part of Paris as a waitress. After finding a lost treasure belonging to the former occupant of her apartment, she decides to return it to him. After seeing his reaction and his new found perspective - she decides to devote her life to the people around her. Such as, her father who is obsessed with his garden-gnome, a failed writer, a hypochondriac, a man who stalks his ex girlfriends, the "ghost", a suppressed young soul, the love of her life and a man whose bones are as brittle as glass. But after consuming herself with these escapades - she finds out that she is disregarding her own life and damaging her quest for love. Amélie then discovers she must become more aggressive and take a hold of her life and capture the beauty of love she has always dreamed of."

—spragg_s

Read more reviews like this here. Shown below is the trailer.

Narrative

The film begins with a narrator speaking about the likes and dislikes of different characters. The narration only takes place in the beginning of the film and at the end. The rest of the film is from Amelie's perspective aside from the occasional interruption from a different significant character. The begins with Amelie as a child and follows her through adulthood. There is no use of flashbacks in this film, however Amelie's childhood is still of importance throughout the movie.

Color palette

The color palette of Amelie is extremely consistent throughout the whole film. The is almost always red, green, and yellow tones in each shot, especially emphasizing the complementary colors, green and red . The tones are not vibrant or bright in most cases. They almost look as if they are more earth toned. Shown below is the color palette for this film as well as some screen captures.

Lighting

The lighting in the movie in extremely consistent whether the scene is outside, inside, during the day, or at night time. I noticed that even when a scene is outside, the sky is never a bright and vibrant sky blue. Instead, the sky stays within the hues of the color palette and is more of a green-blue than anything else. Here are some examples shown below,

Convergent Vs. Divergent Thinking

Throughout the film, Amelie is convergently and divergently thinking. Convergent meaning intentionally making specific choices to achieve an end result, divergent meaning more open mindedness resulting in less calculated results.

The Wizard of OZ

Scale