With soft, strange, and comforting stop-motion animation, Ma Vie De Courgette tells a heartwrenching story of love, fear, and what it means to be family in the face of adversity, writes Kas Ellis.
Ma Vie De Courgette isn’t actually a movie about a courgette. However, it’s a delicious substitute and offers just as much flavour as the vegetable, with the added benefit that while you can’t re-eat a courgette, you can rewatch this movie after you’re done, which you’ll likely want to do.
After inadvertently causing his mother to die, Courgette (voiced by Gaspard Schlatter) is shipped off to an orphanage. It’s here that he meets Simon (Paulin Jaccoud) and Camille (Sixtine Murat)]. The three become friends, and learn that Camille’s aunt is trying to get custody of her only for the money that she’d get as a result. The children work together to see if they can stop this from happening.
In this animated comedy drama, director Claude Barras effortlessly creates a world that is realistic, dark, but full of whimsy. There’s something almost unsettling about the style of stop motion, with the wide eyes and the long limbs, but all the while, having this certain naivety to the sculptures.
It’s impossible to hide from the childish nature of this movie, which makes the dark themes all the more impactful. From the get go, we’re faced with Courgette’s mother dying a in a drunken rage. And the events of this haunt him all throughout. We aren’t allowed to forget about such harsh things easily, we just have to deal with it, and I love it.
The whole movie is a bittersweet dedication to the ups and downs of life, and the unfortunate reality we sometimes find ourselves in, albeit a bit extreme in Courgette’s case. It doesn’t let you forget that sometimes, that’s just life. C’est la vie. But it does it in such a cute, gentle way that you’re hooked, led through this depressingly sweet story, wanting to just keep watching.
However, while done on purpose for this very reason, the rocky pacing left me bitter, with moments that I felt deserved to have been expanded on left cut short, and ones that dragged on that I felt shouldn’t have been. I just wished it made for a bit more of an easy watch in this regard, the uneven pace left me plainly confused at places.
Yet Ma Vie De Courgette is nothing short of brilliant, from the gorgeous animation, to the incredibly rich emotional depth. It’s a healthy snack I’m more than happy to recommend.
