Symbolism was a very important component used throughout the film Amélie. It was essential to correlating events to one another and bringing everything together. The color red was a significant color used throughout the movie. Red can be used to represent warmth, energy, passion and love. This color was often used to reflect Amélie’s life and mood. We were first introduced to this color in the opening scene of Amélie eating red raspberries and red cherries off of her fingers and caring for her pet fish, which of course was the color red. These key elements symbolize her passion and vital young mind (Color website). Nino is also “obsessed by the image of a bald man with red shoes whose identity is a mystery” (Vanderschelden x). The bald guy’s red shoes were always a descriptive detail of him. Lastly, red can be used to symbolize romance, which is exactly what happened between Amélie and Nino at the end of the film. However, enough about the color red, that is only one of the many important symbols used throughout this film. Places of confinement, such as: photo booths, toy boxes, cameras and photo frames are placed in many scenes throughout this story. These different places of confinement represent Amélie’s fear of confronting the outside world and these places generate a place of safety for Amélie. However, Amélie’s curiosity and her taste for perplexing schemes push her out of confinement into the real world. Another important symbol in this film is Amélie’s father’s garden gnome. This gnome represents her father’s dream to travel, however his wife puts the gnome in the tool shed because she hated it and he also puts this dream aside to care for Amélie’s “heart defect.” After his wife’s death, he takes the gnome out and cements it to her shrine, suggesting that he is thinking about travelling, but does not want to leave his wife. It’s not until Amélie breaks the gnome off of the shrine and sends it around the world that her father realizes that his dream of travelling should become a reality (Runge “Introduction to Film”). Lastly, the scrapbook of photo-booth pictures symbolizes Amélie’s need for human interaction despite her shyness. The memory box that she found in her bathroom could also symbolize her lost childhood by having protective parents who were always worried about her “heart defect.” Many of these symbolic elements can go unnoticed when watching this interesting film, however thinking about them afterwards can help to understand key elements and create further discussion about the film.