Sightlines · reception

How My Life as a Zucchini was received

2016 · Claude Barras · My Life as a Zucchini on Sightlines

The arc

No reappraisal needed: it stormed out of Cannes' Directors' Fortnight in 2016, swept Annecy, won two Césars and landed an Oscar nomination — and a decade on it's only consolidated its status as one of the 2010s' most beloved animated sleepers.

What’s debated

The eternal fan debates: is its 66-minute runtime a perfectly-formed miracle or a film that ends just as you've fallen for it — and is this 'kids' movie' actually for kids at all (the US slapped it with a PG-13)?

Its footprint

Courgette's enormous eyes and blue hair became the face of the GKIDS-era indie animation wave, and the film is a permanent fixture on 'movies that will emotionally destroy you in under 70 minutes' lists.

Where it stands

A certified Letterboxd darling of the modern stop-motion canon — the classic 'it's only an hour, you have no excuse' recommendation.

Did you know? The screenplay was written by Céline Sciamma, who went on to make Portrait of a Lady on Fire — and at just 66 minutes it's one of the shortest films ever nominated for the Best Animated Feature Oscar.

Named by the director

• Ken Loach — Barras said he loves Loach's social-realist films and wanted to make that kind of cinema, but for children.
• Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne — Cited alongside Loach for their handling of social subjects through emotion and close-ups on faces and eyes, which he wanted to echo in the puppets.
• The 400 Blows (1959) — Barras cited Jean-Pierre Léaud's audition footage from the DVD as the inspiration for how he cast and directed his child voice actors — and said he deliberately reversed Truffaut's orphanage-as-prison trope.
• Creature Comforts (1989) — Named alongside the Léaud auditions as a model for building the animation around real, naturalistic recorded voices.