My Life As A Courgette
Courgette, the blue-haired boy of this Oscar-winning French film's title, is sent to a home for abandoned children after accidentally injuring his mother. She was a divorcee and drank in front of the television while Courgette made towers out of the cans in his attic room and flew a kite decorated with a painting of his father. At the home it takes time for him to adjust and make friends, but when a girl is dropped off by an angry relative Courgette is wide eyed and smiling.
Surrounding all stop-motion animation films is an air of serious dedication; clearly love and attention to detail went into every single frame. This is why there are no claymation bargain bins - you would have to really try hard to make a bad one, the sheer skill and passion needed to pull off something like this is always staggering. Courgette might not be as smooth as a Laika feature (creators of Coraline, Kubo and the Two Strings, etc.) but it does retain that jerky quality of a Wallace and Gromit short. Much is reminiscent of Tim Burton's films, with its range of weird kids, but the supernatural element is discarded. It's the sunken eyes that draw the comparison, the woeful expressions and pale complexions – stop-motion is made for this kind of uncanniness. The closest the genre’s got so far to a look of ‘reality’ is Charlie Kaufmann’s Anomalisa a few years ago.
It’s all endearing, and it surpasses several boundaries of a standard children’s feature film – for those viewers of the right age, it has a very distinct Tracy Beaker vibe going on, but soon finds ways to move beyond. The film starts to convince as relationships develop and are allowed to play out in other situations. A field trip to a chalet in the mountains is a chance for snow and disco romance, and a trip to a policeman’s house full of miniature cacti is pleasant. The message in the end of My Life as a Courgette is clear: parents must accept a child, whatever their behaviour or however they look. Simple and well done; not a classic, perhaps, but deserving of its Oscar.
7/10
