English Dub Review: My Life As A Zucchini

Trying to figure out how zucchinis relate to orphans.

As an animation reviewer, I’m always on the lookout for unique animated movies. It’s become easier and easier to be disillusioned with the medium, feeling as if every popular animated movie has an invisible label reading “for children only.” Being observant of the medium’s experiments and evolution into different art, animation and writing style yields oneself many interesting finds. Of course, you will find many animated movies that should have been left buried but then there are particular films that beat the odds of the community’s fickle attention span and truly shine. My Life as a Zucchini is the latest of the lucky chosen which is astonishing as boiled down to its most crucial elements it’s a child acted stop-motion animated comedy. In terms of niches, My Life as a Zucchini by all intents and purposes would be overlooked. However, something connected with its audience and I’m here to give my thoughts on what that was and if that is enough reason for you to watch it.

Based on the 2002 novel, Autobiographie d’une Courgette, My Life as a Zucchini is a slice of life comedy centered around an orphanage and the 7 orphans who live there; Simon, Camille, Beatrice, Ahmed, Georgie, Alice and the titular Zucchini. We follow their many adventures over the year Zucchini stays there and learn of the tragic backstories to each of the kids’ reasons for being stuck in the orphanage. There is no over-arching rising or falling action to the story to pull the audience in with “drama.” However, the concept of adding “drama,” is not what the movie is focusing on. Instead, Zucchini focuses on the clear, natural emotions AND reactions our young characters go through and lets those emotions guide the story. An example of this emotion guiding is the beginning of our main character Zucchini’s with him accidentally killing his drunk and abusive mother. By obvious standards that is tragic, but in the grand scheme of the movie, it’s not important to the narrative, what really hits home is how the emotions from the first crushing disaster are healed over time due to the interaction of Zucchini with the other children. That is where the heart of the movie lies and the way the creators achieved this was through the use of very regular more unknown child actors.

Both in the original language and dub versions of the movie the actors chosen for the roles of Zucchini and the kids were by and large nobodies in the film industry. Just a bunch of kids. While I can’t confirm if they used the same method in the dub recording, by watching the behind the scenes making of for the movie you see how the director went to great lengths to get the most natural real line readings from the children. In usual voice recording sessions, the actor would be sat in an audio booth by themselves reading off lines from a script, maybe in other scenarios, they have the actors from the same scene reading their lines together but nevertheless, voice acting is usually done in a stationary form. Instead of that for these kids, the director not only had them act their lines as they were all present in the same stage but encouraged the kids to act out each scene as they went through the script. This way the crew could record their reactions to the scenes in real time and have the video footage of their movement makes perfect reference material for the stop-motion animation.

But this attention to real feeling performances expanded into the animation department and how they went about developing their puppets. It’s quite fascinating the thought process that just went behind the type of eyes the puppets should have, ones with a gleam to them, to give the viewer a sensation of human familiarity while not falling into the uncanny valley. This is just a more real feeling movie that pulls you back to the days when you were a kid. When you were silly and emotional and just trying to understand the world. What I loved most about the film’s representation of children is that they never made the kids dumb. In a lot of animation especially for kid’s animated movies, it is so easy for writers to write their children characters as hyperactive little trolls as in a narrative sense that character trait can lead to more conflict. While I can’t say, the kids are by any means deep, if I were to be bluntly honest outside of the main three kids the other four fall into very rudimentary archetypes and can be forgettable, they use their simple character traits to their advantage. Making each scene with them as honest and emotional as possible, a standout scene in my head was with Ahmed when he gets accused of stealing. The scene doesn’t lead to much outside of giving Ahmed a prop to wear but his frustrated reaction, his heart broken voice, he is an archetype but he and the rest of the kids are archetypes with agency, choice, and interaction.

There’s a false perception out there in the public consciousness that says that any archetypes and stereotypes are bad. That movies and shows should all have deep, multi-layered characters. While that is a lovely thought it’s also just too optimistic as a “deep” character isn’t necessarily needed for every scenario. For example, The Simpsons is what I would describe as an archetypical comedy where every character is an archetype or stereotype of some form. The reason we loved that cast and why Zucchini and his friends feel more natural is that the movie allows the interactions to just play out. The characters can bounce feelings, jokes and more off each other and the action and reaction in that interaction allow their archetypical persona to become layered. A character isn’t deep on their own, they become deep based on their action and reaction in situations.

When I get right down to it, there is really nothing bad I can say about My Life as a Zucchini. This type of story structure may come across as dull and boring to some people but for people who love character interaction like me? The simple emotion and feel-good tone that is on display in writing and animation is enough to make me hope that everyone out there will give this film a try. I’m only left with one question though. Why would his mom nickname him Zucchini?