My Life as a Zucchini 2016
In a time when computer animation has nearly wiped out 2D animation, it amazes me that people are still making stop motion animated features. These are incredibly labor intensive and painstaking. The extras for this movie say that an animator might make 4 seconds of footage per day, having to shoot 24 frames per second. So they might have 10-15 animators working on different sets at the same time and they hope to get a few minutes of movie per week, and that is probably at peak production. One thing they have going for them on this movie is that it is only 67 minutes long. This movie was made in Switzerland, originally in French, but dubbed well in English. They work very hard to make the lips match the words, but I doubt they reanimated the mouths for English and I didn’t really notice.
I got a free digital copy of the movie, knowing very little about it, but impressed with its very good reviews and an Oscar nomination for Best Animated Film, which it lost to Zootopia in a particularly competitive year. I was also surprised that it was rated PG-13, but it has some kid-level discussion of sex and at least a little violence shown or implied, including against kids in the group foster home where most of the movie takes place. So maybe this movie isn’t for little kids, but could work fine for tweens and older. Really it is a kids’ movie for grown-ups.
It is a fairly simple movie and easy to like, unlike some critically-acclaimed animation from Europe (looking at you, The Red Turtle). That’s nice, but it is hard to give it the highest marks. It has a good sense of humor even while dancing around some dark material and the animation and voices work well, the only recognizable voice (for me) being Nick Offerman as a kindly police officer, despite Will Forte and Ellen/Elliott Page being in there somewhere too.
Written: 27 Apr 2021
Owned on: Blu-ray, DVD, Digital