2024-04-30 21:05:58
In 2016, it was presented at the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. The life of zucchini (My life as a Zucchini), of Claude Barras, a film that once seen becomes an unforgettable memory about friendship, love, family ties, silences, compassion, joy. And although it is true that not all animation is for children, they are not exempt from marveling at the story.
Guillermo del Toro He says and says well: animation is cinema, it is not a genre. Not for nothing is he an unrepentant defender of what he calls “a medium.” Perhaps within the film industry what the director of The Pan’s Labyrinth (2006) about how animation is viewed, even as if it were worth less or less important. That is why it is for undomesticated spirits, as Guillermo says.
However, few animated films reflect in substance and form all that is said not only by del Toro but by many other enthusiasts. Not that they reflect it because they are worth more or less than others, but rather that they seem to fully follow that defiant and rebellious spirit, without ties, stepping on the accelerator. Such is the case of The life of Zucchini.
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It is an apparently simple film that tells the life of Icare, an 8-year-old boy who lives with his mother, a woman immersed in alcohol who does nothing but watch television and rejoice in the pain it caused her. He abandoned his ex-partner. Of course, he does not maintain a friendly relationship with her son; However, it was she who gave him the name Zucchini.
After an incident, of course disrupted by the drunkenness and fear of a child who does not know how his mother will react to his slightest mistakes, his mother loses her life. She then meets Raymond at the police station. The latter magically sympathizes with Zucchini when he learns his story and takes him to the orphanage that will serve as the setting for the rest of the story.
It will be in that place that Zucchini, never again called Icare, will give a name to all the feelings that he has been keeping in his being for years, as well as everything that he will know from the hand of Ahmed, Jujube, Beatrice, Alice, Camille and Simón, the other children who also live in the orphanage.
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The life of Zucchini It is a frankly unforgettable portrait of the growth that is forced by oblivion, that which we only have access to through the decisions of others, that is to say that our life, in those moments, is a consequence of what those who brought us into the world did. The question arises, then: how to learn to look from this? For what purpose? Even the question that no one asks but everyone feels the need to answer: why me? Or, in this case, why them.
It is, in turn, an awareness-raising exercise, which blurs the horizons that we understand as natural or obvious. Among many others, that of “traditional” families. Here adoption is, exists and resists. The approach is so transparent that there is no remedy. There is no way not to laugh and cry, not to understand what is being said throughout the entire film. The heart that the script has (of Celine Sciamma) combines perfectly with the work done in stop-motion, as it denotes a deeper texture. There is, without a doubt, too much heart. And finally, only until now, perhaps we can understand what the endearing Simón says: we are all equal. How right he was.
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2024-04-30 21:05:58