My Life as a Zucchini (2016)
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My Life as a Zucchini Movie Review
My Life as a Zucchini is a 2016 Swiss animated film directed by Claude Barras. It is such a pleasant, yet dark film that is one of the best animated films from this year.
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“No one wants to adopt kids as old as we are“
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It follows a boy who accidentally kills his mother and is sent to orphanage where he is bullied at first, but eventually forms friendships and falls in love with a newly arrived girl. Now this is a very interesting film, I have to say that it surprised me with its content. It is basically a film that is not for children aged nine or less as it might be too dark for them, but it is still light enough that older children may enjoy it.
I liked that duality present here. The film deals with a lot of important and tragic issues as each and every one of these orphan kids either lost their parents or were neglected and abused. I surely did not expect to see such frankness and raw emotion when dealing with this difficult subject matter and was thus pleasantly surprised by it.
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It also has some quite mature sexual conversations between the kids. To me they were overwhelming and somewhat out of place here, but they still felt realistic as this is how kids talk in real life. But the inclusion of such suggestive dialogue in a supposedly children’s cartoon was quite unexpected.
But on the other hand, My Life as a Zucchini also manages to find light in the vast areas of darkness and that I not only respected, but I found it to be a perfect approach for this kind of film. It is both light and dark with an ending that is so sweet and triumphant that it never felt cheap, but rather earned as the emotion and characterization were more than competent for such an ending to work. It surely is an immensely enjoyable and charming film that is awfully dark and mature in some areas and that juxtaposition was quite innovative in my opinion and mostly handled in a very smooth manner.
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The characters are superb, all of them really well developed and they all left an impression on me, each and every one of them and that was tremendously commendable. Camille is quite likable and a very strong female character. Courgette is overly typical, yet well realized. Raymond the policeman is such a sympathetic, wonderful man and I was so happy that he chose to be the guardian to those two.
I liked that all of the kids had their quirks and especially their problems, that was realistic and also quite tragic to witness. Simon is such a familiar, yet so well utilized bully character and I liked his arc quite a bit. But Camille’s aunt was just way too over-the-top and villainy in my opinion.
The animation in My Life as a Courgette is splendid. It is the kind of stop-motion that doesn’t rely particularly on detail, but it is so well designed in its characters and so polished as a whole that it was beautiful to watch. I found some of the imagery here to be quite memorable and even delightful. The colors are also very well incorporated with some excellent choices. And I admired how they managed to tell this story with minimal dialogue and sometimes being told by visuals alone. That is what film and especially animation is supposed to do which is why this film succeeds entirely on both storytelling and technical grounds.
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My Life as a Zucchini does have sometimes too on-the-nose dialogue and those sex conversations weren’t my cup of tea, but most of the dialogue was surprisingly sophisticated and it felt real to me. The script is great, the direction is very strong and the editing is particularly effective. The film is so well edited and paced that it was never rushed despite its very short running time. But this run time was just enough and fitting for this material and the film succeeds because it never prolongs its scenes. It also features one of the best adapted screenplays of the entire year. In the end, I found this flick not only to be one of the year’s best animated movies, but also one of the best foreign films of 2016 as well. It is that good and a perfect example of a seemingly simplistic film that is actually very complex, emotional and even deep.
My Life as a Zucchini is one of the year’s finest animated as well as foreign films. The script is very strong, the editing is superb, the dialogue is mostly realistic, the characters are so well developed and its animation is charming and wonderful. It is a film that is both light and dark, funny and emotional, childlike but also adult and that juxtaposition of humor and joy with tragic faiths and deep moments led to such an interesting, quite unique and rich film.
My Rating – 4.5
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