My Life as a Zucchini (2016)
★★★½ — My Life as a Zucchini (2016)
There's a moment early in My Life as a Courgette where a small boy with enormous blue eyes stares at the ceiling of a strange new room, clutching a can of beer that was his late mother's, and the weight of it nearly breaks you. No grand score swells. No voiceover explains what he's feeling. The film just holds the image, trusting you to feel it yourself. And you do. God, you do.
This is a small film in the best possible sense. Sixty-six minutes, stop-motion claymation, a cast of troubled children in a group home. On paper it sounds slight, maybe even slight enough to dismiss. Don't. My Life as a Courgette (known in some territories as My Life as a Zucchini, after the English dub) is quietly one of the most emotionally intelligent films about childhood I've seen, and I say that without a hint of qualification.
The boy nicknamed Courgette arrives at his new home carrying an invisible suitcase full of grief, confusion and guilt. The other children around him are doing exactly the same, each one scarred in their own particular way, by neglect, by violence, by abandonment. The film doesn't dramatise any of this for effect. It lets the kids talk about it in that blunt, matter-of-fact way children actually do, discussing why their parents left them or what alcohol does to a person with the same casual directness they'd use talking about football or school dinners. It's funny, sometimes, and heartbreaking immediately afterwards. That tonal tightrope is walked with extraordinary care.
The animation style is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. The characters have these big, soft, slightly melancholy eyes that communicate more than pages of dialogue ever could. The colour palette leans into muted blues and warm earthy tones, and there's a visual gentleness to everything that sits in deliberate contrast with the harshness of what these children have lived through. It never exploits its subject matter. It never manipulates you with a cheap emotional trick. It earns every feeling it generates, and it generates quite a few.
What I find most impressive is how the film handles hope without lying about the world. The friendships that form among the children feel completely genuine, scraped together out of shared pain and small kindnesses, and the moments of joy they discover together land harder precisely because of what preceded them. This isn't a film that promises everything will be fine. It's a film that says even in genuinely difficult circumstances, connection is possible, and that connection matters. That's a different and more honest thing.
It's also, I'd argue, one of the better entry points for talking to younger viewers about difficult realities, loss, neglect, resilience, without either sugarcoating or traumatising. It proves that you can be honest about the world children sometimes inhabit without making the experience of watching feel like a punishment. I'm reminded of Mustang (2015) in that sense, another film that looks unflinchingly at what children endure while finding reserves of warmth and solidarity within the darkness.
And it fits neatly into a broader conversation about what animation can actually do when it stops trying to be a theme park ride. No Dogs or Italians Allowed (2022) is another recent example of the form being used to tell genuinely human, emotionally complex stories that live-action might have flattened. There's something about the handmade quality of stop-motion in particular that keeps a film like this from feeling cold or clinical. It looks like something someone cared about making.
My only reservation is that sixty-six minutes, for all its efficiency, occasionally feels rushed in the final stretch. A few of the relationships could have used a little more room to breathe. But that's a minor complaint against a film that spends almost every one of those minutes doing something right.
Three and a half stars.
My Life as a Courgette doesn't shout. It whispers, right up close, and says more than most films twice its length. See it.
Rating: ★★★½ | Year: 2016 | Watched: 2026-02-25
Where to watch
Watch in the UK
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Buy: Apple TV Store · Amazon Video
Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi
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