Original title: Ma vie de Courgette

The title of Claude Barras stop motion feature debut (he’d directed several short films, including 2010’s Zucchini, a 3 minute test run for this film) might suggest a more whimsical film than the one we got, a magical tale of transformation into a vegetable and all the playfulness that might suggest. And while the film does have a lot of charm, whet we get instead is a brutally honest and unsentimental look at a tragically unhappy childhood.

The Courgette of the title is a young Swiss boy, born Icare (voiced in the Swiss/French original by Gaspard Schlatter and in the English dub by Erick Abbate) but known to his alcoholic mother (Natacha Koutchoumov/Susanne Blakeslee) by his nickname. One day, in a drunken rage, his mother comes after him and Courgette accidentally causes her to fall down the stairs to her death. At the police station, Officer Raymond (Michel Vuillermoz/Nick Offerman) is sympathetic to the damaged boy whose only possession are now a suitcase containing one of his mother’s beer cans and a homemade kite with a drawing of the father who abandoned him as a superhero. Raymond takes Courgette to an orphanage where he’s initially bullied by another of the kids, Simon (Paulin Jaccoud/ Romy Beckman), though eventually they become friends and Simon fills Courgette in on the other kids and their sad stories. “There’s nobody left to love us,” he tells him. The arrival of new girl Camille (Sixtine Murat/ Ness Krell) offers a ray of light for Courgette who develops a crush on her and the soon bond, while Raymond stays in touch. After dodging the attentions of Camille’s cruel aunt and getting the better of her at a court hearing, Courgette and Camille are fostered by Raymond, Courgette continuing to write to his newfound friends left behind at the orphanage.

At first sight, My Life as a Courgette (retitled My Life as a Zucchini in the States and Australia) might seem a less than attractive prospect. But while but is often achingly sad, it’s also curiously uplifting, emotional without ever becoming mawkish. It’s unafraid to take a ;long cold look at the lot handed to those children who fall through society’s cracks and this is due in no small part to the input from writer/director Céline Sciamma who co-wrote ethe adaptation of Gilles Paris’ 2022 novel Autobiographie d’une Courgette (already adapted as the live-action television film C’est mieux la vie quand on est grand in 2007) with Barras, Germano Zullo and Morgan Navarro. Sciamma had made a name for herself crafting films about young people and particularly their struggles with identity and sexuality and there’s much of the former in Barras’ film.

Courgette refuses to answer to the name Icare, creating a new life for himself as Courgette and learning painful lessons about his place in the world. Left alone without parents to care for him, he finds that he’s nothing special in the orphanage, just another broken youngster that society would rather pretend didn’t exist. But he finds solace and eventually hope among his misfit new friends, victims of abuse, the offspring of criminals or the mentally ill or victims of an uncaring immigration policy. The script holds back from wallowing in the misery of the children, hinting at just enough to shock us but never enough to take the focus away from the hope and sense of belonging that they forge among themselves. No matter what the circumstances, a single tragedy shouldn’t define who we become is one of the film’s central messages – there’s the tiniest glimmer of hope in the damaged lives of all of the kids.

But the film bever gives in to easy sentimentality. It’s melancholy rather than sad or depressing and it doesn’t shy away from the fact that the children’s lives are tough and that it’ll take s along time for them to recover from their traumas, if they ever do. It’s all beautifully observed, as much of Scimamma’s work is (she’s always had an acute understanding of the growing pains of her young protagonists), and the children, despite their deliberately oversized heads and weird proportions, feel very real. In one of the most striking moments of the film, a brief shot has the orphans watching in awe as a mother comforts her child after a fall, a simple and very natural gesture that our diminutive heroes have been denied.

And the adults are nicely done too. The monstrous Aunt Ida is straight out of a Disney film, but Raymond is an unexpectedly nuanced character, in his own way as traumatised and abandoned as the children he eventually takes into his life – he has a grown-up son of his own who, for reasons we never really fully understand, no longer talks to him: “sometimes it’s children who abandon their parents,” he tells Courgette and Camille. It’s moments like this that make you wonder who the film was actually being aimed at – younger audiences would fall for the charming orphans without question, but some of the more serious concerns are clearly being targeted at their parents. Somehow Barras and his team get the balance just right, and the film was rewarded with glowing reviews, box office success and a slew of awards and nominations.

Its success is entirely understandable. It’s neither as grim nor as critical of the French welfare system as the book, preferring to approach the story from a more personal perspective, but it’s a gorgeous looking and deeply moving film that works beautifully on so many levels. There’s enough humour to balance the melancholy without it ever making light of the children’s lots – the children indicate their feelings using a “meteo des enfants” board, a weather-based mood board that Barras uses as a shortcut to help his expressive characters get on with the story at hand rather than wasting time setting up each new scene.

Barras announced himself as a major talent with his short films and cemented his reputation with My Life as a Courgette, a gorgeous film on every level and one that crams more emotion, story and issues into a brisk 66 minutes using odd-looking puppets than most live-action films can manage at twice the length. He went on to make an adaptation of Fabien Toulmé comic book Ce n’est pas toi que j’attendais/You’re Not the One I Expected in 2022 and at the time of publication has a third stop-motion feature, Sauvages!, in production. Based on My Life as a Courgette alone, he’s a major talent whose future work should be highly anticipated.