My Life as a Zucchini

An animated story about a group of orphans that looks like moving Play-Doh and is a co-production between France and Switzerland. Does this sound like something you’d be interested in watching? Well, it should be. My Life as a Zucchini is a bittersweet tale of dealing with trauma with quiet resolve and imagery to convey depths of sorrow or joy.

We meet Icare, dubbed Courgette (French for zucchini) by his alcoholic mother, in the first scene. His large eyes have deep blue circles around them to match his hair, and he’s generally somber and quiet, preferring to keep himself. His childhood ends abruptly when an accident leads to his mother’s death, and a kindly policeman takes him to an orphanage. My Life as a Zucchini is evenly split between Icare/Courgette’s growing relationships between his fellow orphans and the kindly policeman who brought him here.

Many of the young kids begin with the routines of social hierarchy and typical behaviors, then moments of grace and connection pop up. For instance, a red-headed bully quickly becomes a friend when he says that “there’s nobody left to love us,” and those words are delivered with a kind of just-so statement of fact. If the tone feels like anything, it’s the combination of charm and melancholy that Charles Schultz imbibed into Peanuts. But with a heavy French accent.

Despite only being a brief 66 minutes, My Life as a Zucchini feels like an epic portrait of kids trying to hold onto some semblance of normalcy despite heavy burdens and psychic scarring. It never feels bogged down in tragedy, and it always manages to shock in its charms and whimsy. Seek this one out.