Abstract
In the context of the continued evolution of children’s film into and through the early twenty-first century, this chapter examines a boundary-pushing example of contemporary children’s film, the recent French-Swiss animation, My Life as a Courgette (Ma vie de courgette, Claude Barras 2016). Widely interpreted by critics as a radical departure from classical children’s film (and even, in some quarters, as an adult-orientated film), My Life as a Courgette challenges many of the narrative and representational motifs of the children’s genre. However, drawing parallels with other twenty-first-century international children’s films, this chapter highlights the ways in which the film adheres to more traditional features of children’s cinema that date back to the early twentieth century.
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Notes
- 1.
In this chapter, I will use the international English-language title, My Life as a Courgette, rather than the alternative title, My Life as a Zucchini, which was titled for distribution in North America.
- 2.
Or to use the broader term applied to productions that reach a larger, multi-demographic audience, “family films.”
- 3.
Coined in 1984, in Gregory Lukow and Steven Ricci’s article “The ‘Audience’ Goes ‘Public’: Inter-textuality, Genre, and the Responsibilities of Film Literacy” (On Film 12: 28–36).
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Brown, N. (2019). Change and Continuity in Contemporary Children’s Cinema. In: Hermansson, C., Zepernick, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Children's Film and Television. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17620-4_12
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