Delicate stop-motion hypnotism which enchanted me with the wrecked lives of children and how misfits get along when stuck together.
Clay, paper and fabric dance across the screen, breathing life into reality between the frame, ditching the lies told 24 times a second for tender movement that works its way into your heart by way of your eyes. What I’m basically trying to waffle here is My Life as a Courgette, much like every soul-soothing stop motion animated film, is a beauty to behold. There’s just something about stop-motion that melts my eyes into a glimmering pool so I’ll attempt to put my bias in a padlocked box and stow it in a cupboard somewhere while writing this.
The affinity this film has to depict such heavy-handed issues is mature in a way that I have longed to see, focusing on kids living in a foster home, each of them coming from a different tin of dysfunctional sardines, dazed yet oddly astute but most certainly broken, these kids are what’s left in the wake of their parents screw-ups. The innocence and purity of childhood is something that we flinch at when it’s tarnished by abuse or trauma because they don’t deserve it, and hell knows plenty of us can relate first hand to their childhood plight, so the salt scatters wider over these wounds. Wholesome dialogue which carries upon its curious timbre, the lives the children are moving away from – which has a way of tailing them hot on their heels – and the life they have here with this marching band of misfits. At no point does the film try to run away from any of these issues, exploring the deepest floors of their emotional caverns and filling them with sobering relief as these kids go from unrest to finding family within each other. You could almost mistake this for a prison drama had the characters been taller with a gruesome criminal record and the foster home equipped with tighter security.
Plus is it just me or does Raymond, the police officer look eerily like Freddie Mercury?
All the characters are lovable (except Camille’s aunt, who karma is probably calling reinforcements against) and their witty nonsense is splattered with the cherry juice of cute humour. By the end of the film I just wanted to give these kids a hug and then realise that they’re made of clay and I’ve physically deformed them so let’s not keep that image on the cinema behind the eyes. Symbolism crawling under the blanket of the animation, you start to draw invisible lines between the minute details that characters carry. The soundtrack carries a beautiful melancholia that makes your heart leap into your throat and then cartwheel back in your chest in joy with the brighter numbers.
You thought I’d leave it alone didn’t you? Well no I won’t, the animation is sublime where characters move with a sluggish uncertain gait as if burdened by their tumultuous past, they caress their way through the objects of the world and leaving an essence of themselves through the softness.
Moved past points which only the best of moving fancies have been able to, my heart feel as if a fireplace is warming its chambers, filling it with the orange hue of peaceful glee. Th vibrance of its colours still clings to my eyes like pepper spray (minus the burning) and now it’s time for me to play with some modelling clay.
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