A boy who kills his alcoholic mum is the unlikely star of this Oscar-nominated family film. Its maker tells us about taking young audiences seriously and planning to ‘crush their little hearts’

Animations made outside of the US rarely get a look-in come Oscar night, Aardman and Studio Ghibli being the only non-American studios to win since animation was given its own category in 2001. On top of that, a “family film” whose nine-year-old protagonist kills his mother might seem a tad dark for voters. And who could fancy the chances of any film, for any prize, when it has the name of a vegetable in its title?

That said, Ma Vie de Courgette, nominated as My Life As a Zucchini and described by its director as “Ken Loach for kids”, has already been breaking the mould. With a clutch of film festival prizes and a European film award, it happens to be a sweetly winning film, feel-good despite its focus on the damaged residents of a French orphanage.

Based on Gilles Paris’s novel Autobiography of a Courgette, it’s directed by Swiss first-timer Claude Barras – with a stop-motion animation style influenced by Tim Burton – and is adapted by one of France’s rising auteurs, the writer/director Céline Sciamma.

Sciamma’s own films – Water Lilies, Tomboy and Girlhood – are, like Courgette, coming-of-age stories. And she suggests that it took little more than a sketch by Barras for her to commit to his project. “I felt a strong connection between my work and this material, because it’s not just about youth, but youth at the margin. There’s a strong social context to work with; you can be political and make propositions.”

The story concerns Icare, nicknamed Courgette by his alcoholic single mum before he accidentally kills her while playing with her empty beer cans. When the boy arrives at an orphanage, he encounters other children whose family troubles represent a catalogue of social problems: drug addiction, mental illness, crime, child abuse and deportation.

One thing they don’t have to worry about is the home itself; Sciamma calls the novel a “tribute to social workers” that paints a picture of the system working at its best. And with the help of the staff, a kindly policeman and particularly each other, the kids soon find reasons for optimism.

“The movie is about friendship, solidarity, how we bond. And I think it’s a tribute to being welcoming to others, which is quite an issue today.” She laughs. “It’s four years since I wrote the script. Before I saw the film I was thinking, ‘This is going to be like a postcard sent from the past.’ But it wasn’t. It had a very strong sense of actuality, of today. We made it as a melodrama – and now we’re living in it.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘A tribute to being welcoming to others’ … My Life As a Courgette. Photograph: Allstar/Rita Productions

What makes Courgette notable is the manner in which its tough material is packaged. “The book was written for adults, and had a strong teenage readership, whereas the whole point of this new narrative was to include a very young audience – that it could be a family film that would please everybody.

“You often find with animation, the Pixar movies, the Disney movies, that the filmmakers are trying to give adults some reason to bear the film – they’re winking at them, adding all these levels of reading it. Courgette is the opposite, everybody’s watching the same film, we don’t wink at anyone.

“Of course a very young kid won’t get the same out of it as a teenager, but it’s all there. The goal was to take children very seriously as characters, in the writing, and to take children very seriously as an audience, believing in their intelligence.”

She has a glint in her eye. “It was also the first time that I wanted people to cry. I thought, ‘I want to crush their little hearts’.”

Water Lilies dealt with teenage desire; in Tomboy, a 10-year-old girl pretends to be a boy; in Girlhood a young black woman from a tough banlieue fights to establish her independence; Being 17, which Sciamma co-wrote with André Téchiné, charts the violent beginnings of a young male romance. These are strong stories about identity, sexuality and self-determination, at once touching and provocative.

She recalls the “strange controversy” over her second film. “When Tomboy came out it was a success. Then a year later there was this protest against gay marriage in France and suddenly the film became evil. Christian rightwing activists wanted it banned, there were strikes in schools against it. It was amazing, just a year after it opened very peacefully.”

Sciamma, who describes herself as “a very middle class girl from the suburbs” yet has the amused air of someone who may have had her own, transformative coming of age, remains undeterred. “I like the fact that my films have always been in a strong dialogue with the society I live in, with what’s in the air. Every film I’ve made for myself, and even this one – as Claude’s soldier – has had a strong political background and point of view. When you make cinema, if you represent the world then it’s political.”

She speaks of the tension in France, with the country still recovering from terrorist attacks (“life changed, really”), the uncertainty of the coming elections and the threat of Marine Le Pen. She’s not telling if, or how her next film as director will respond to all of that. Might it be the feminist horror movie she recently mooted? “Kind of, it could be. It will be feminist for sure. And it will talk about fear.”