My Life as a Zucchini
All actors and roles (10)
All team (75)
Short description
After his mother dies, nine-year-old Icar, nicknamed Courgette, is taken to a children's home by Raymond, a police officer who becomes a steady presence in his life. The home is filled with boys and girls his own age, among them Simon, Ahmed, Jujube, Alice and Béatrice, each carrying a difficult history. Courgette struggles at first to find his place, then gradually forms friendships and begins to trust the people around him. When a girl named Camille arrives, he feels something new, and the group's loyalty is tested by a relative who wants to take her away.
The film is a stop-motion animated feature directed by Claude Barras, his first, followed years later by Savages. Céline Sciamma wrote the screenplay, and the voice cast includes Gaspard Schlatter as Courgette, Sixtine Murat as Camille, Paulin Jaccoud as Simon and Michel Vuillermoz as Raymond. It is a French and Swiss co-production running 66 minutes, made for about 8 million USD and earning roughly 6 million USD worldwide.
Critical response was strong: critics gave it 8.2/10 across 136 reviews, while audiences rated it 7.8/10 on IMDb from 33,000 votes and 7.8/10 on TMDB from 1,552 votes. The narrow gap between the two suggests the film met expectations on both sides.
What's left behind the scenes
- 60 different backgrounds and 54 puppets were created for the cartoon, each with three costumes.
- According to the director, he deliberately chose a simplified animation style, as he believes that this manner of presentation will help viewers read emotions from the screen and identify with the characters.
- According to Claude Barras, the work acquired the necessary rhythm and atmosphere due to the fact that the cartoon was created consistently, following the logic of the plot development.
- The film is based on Gilles Paris’s novel “I Wanted to Kill the Sky. The Autobiography of Zucchini” (“Autobiographie d'une Courgette”), which deeply impressed Claude Barras.
- The roles of the children were voiced by non-professional actors.
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