The hybrid nature of the film Amélie strengthens the exploration of multiple motifs and themes including magical realism, loneliness, and transformation. Many critics and audiences link Amélie to the literary genre of fairytales, however the plot in the film is not supernatural.

Amélie is a 2001 comedy film by French director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (the director of The City of Lost Children, A Very Long Engagement, and Alien: Ressurection) starring Audrey Tautou (The Da Vinci Code). It tells the story of Amélie Poulain (Tautou), an imaginative, fun-loving and friendly, but very shy waitress, living in Paris. One, day she accidentally discovers a box that has been hidden in her apartment, and when she opens it, she finds treasures that once belonged to a young boy years before.

With reference to key theories studied on the module and one of the films from the given list, critically analyse the image system of the film, and the ways in which supports to convey specific meanings. You must comment on the way in which the narrative, meaning and mood are supported by the formal elements, and draw connections with the relevant historical, cultural and genre contexts.

Amélie is one of my favorite films. I remember when I saw it for the first time. I watched it on a laptop while sitting in an armchair at my parents house. I had borrowed the DVD from the apprentice of a local potter who’s name escapes me now. “Watch this movie” he said. “Its really good.” It blew me away. It did things I had never seen done in a movie before. Granted, I wasn’t really into film at the time, but I still had watched plenty of movies.

Amélie is one of the first films I remember, not because I sat down and watched it at a pivotal time in my life, but because I experienced it as a child in very visceral way. It was probably just after the film was released in 2001, that this happened. I had, had a nightmare one night and wandered out to where my mother and sister (who would have been in her twenties at the time and had just returned from Paris) were watching a film. I vividly remember the green lighting that emanated from the screen, as I walked down the hallway toward the couch and I think this must have been the first time I experienced film light. My mother let me lie down on the couch to get back to sleep and I remember just watching the screen from a dutch angle, not understanding anything, really. I fell back to sleep, in a whirlwind of French that I could not understand, in subtitles I could barely read at the time. It was disorienting in its beauty and I wish I could have found a clip of this scene to analyse, but was unable to.

Dufayel paints a copy of Renoir's Luncheon of the Boating Party every year, but he might as well just be painting the word METAPHOR in big block letters on a bright yellow canvas. He says he has the most trouble capturing the look of the girl with the glass of water. This girl is totally a stand-in for Amélie, and Dufayel and Amélie frequently have thinly veiled exchanges about this girl in the painting, when what they're really talking about is Amélie herself.

In Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s romantic masterpiece AMELIE, the narrative, characters, and production design are all geared towards giving the film a very distinctive “fairy tale” atmosphere that further informs its romantic qualities. This involves removing the audience from the story, to a certain degree, and presenting the narrative as though it’s being delivered to us, it is something we are being shown in the hopes we will find ourselves in it, but it is not a standard romantic comedy in which the characters are supposed to be everypeople.

The film Amélie, directed by Jean-Pierre Jeunet is the story of a French girl. Being raised by a cold father and a mother who is at constant stress, she has been suppressed by her parents all her life. Short after the beginning of the film, her mother faces death, leaving Amélie to spend the rest of her childhood living with her father. She grows up with lack of love and comfort. She dreams of the days in which she will get to move out of her father’s home, and have one of herself. Amélie is portrayed as a unique, odd, yet innocent girl, who faces her own isolation through the good deed she offers to the world. As Amélie notices that she takes a great joy in changing the lives of people around her for the better, she spends most of her time doing so. Along her journey, she is exposed to love, which she has never before experienced.

The world inhabited by Amélie Poulain is not like the one the rest of us live in. The colours are brighter, the coincidences odder, and every little sound speaks volumes.