A 70-minute film featuring stop-motion puppets that look like emojis styled by Tim Burton is the unexpected source of this year’s most enchanting and nuanced coming of age story. Director Claude Barras is at the helm of My Life As A Courgette – Switzerland’s Oscar entry for Best Animated Feature – which is told through French. Exquisitely constructed, bright coloured puppets with large heads populate the world in which our main character, Courgette, lives.

Courgette is soft-spoken with blue hair and huge expressive eyes that blink in fear when his abusive alcoholic mother screams at him.
After a tragic accident, Courgette is sent to a foster home for parentless children – stories of crime, abuse, deportation and neglect are shared openly on the playground. “We’re all the same,” flame-haired Simon tells Courgette. “There’s no-one left to love us.”

But they can love each other in a multitude of ways. Courgette becomes enamoured with new girl Camille, who is kind and witty despite a lifetime of unspeakable cruelty. And the foster children learn to love each other, creating bonds that make them feel safe and accepted.
The voice actors are perfectly cast, with Gaspard Schlatter bringing a wistful melancholy to Courgette. His performance is filled with brief sighs of happiness and gasps of fear – minute vocal expressions matched by the subtle facial movements of the puppets, and the psychological details of their desperate need for love. One boy runs to the window whenever a car pulls up, hoping it’s his mother. Another girl sets herself impossible challenges, mimicking the OCD she observed in her mother.

The emotional heft of the story doesn’t detract from the charm of the protagonists, with the film’s humour and joy jumping off the screen, as oversized and unmissable as the characters’ adorable faces.