Hop-o'-My-Thumb is the youngest of seven children in a poor woodcutter's family. When the children are abandoned by their parents, he finds their way back home for he has scattered little stones .The next time, the bread crumbs are not as effective,for the birds have eaten them .Afterward ,he's threatened and pursued by an ogre.

Hop-o'-My-Thumb is here a little black boy ,not abandoned , but who has lost his mom ; he wanders on the Seine banks where he meets a homeless woman ,who looks like a witch ,but who first reluctantly ,will become his fairy godmother .

The ogre is ,with a few exceptions ,the hostile world outside ,hard on the poor: by joining her, the boy becomes an outcast too ;he is what the law calls " a dubliner" and he must be sent back with his mom from a detention centre to Austria ; then begins a long search ,full of pitfalls ...

There's magnificent night shots of les quais de Paris with an illuminated Saint-Louis island and Notre Dame ,and who could think there's so much distress,so much poverty in these magnificent places?

Carherine Frot is admirable is her thankless part : her character is not cardboard ,in spite of the first sequences ,too clichéd ( a woman who tries to get rid of a little dog that follows her everywhere): the cast and credits ,then a locket suggest a woman who's lost all her dear ones ,an educated woman who reads a scientific magazine ,"science et vie" she probably found in a garbage can and who can recite laws of Newton by heart ; this kind of person is not unplausible at all .Life can destroy people who were once well integrated in the society.

For a short while ,she 's found a new reason to live. Helped by a prostitute (played by Frot's own sister)whose van becomes the seven-league boots , she really goes out of her way for this mother and child reunion.

A warm and beautiful movie.