My Life as a Zucchini (2016)

This is such a good movie.  In fact I like it much better than the winner in this category, and the fact that Switzerland submitted it as their Best Foreign Language film submission makes me like them just a teensy bit more.
You know you are not watching a children's movie even though it is animated when in the opening scene the child, in an effort to escape his enraged drunk mother, shuts the trap door to his room, causing her to fall down the stairs and die, leaving him an orphan. Amazingly, life in this particular orphanage is not terribly bad at all. The kids give him a hard time to begin with but their early rivalries grow into deep friendships. Soon Camille, turns up, and she and Zucchini find an immediate affinity.  The only glitch is Camille’s terrifying aunt who barges into the orphanage like the proverbial bull in a china shop to demand custody. The plot twist by which that danger is averted is a clever one, but this is not a very plot-driven film, which is unusual for an animated picture. That’s not to say the writing is lacking. The character work here is both intimate and nicely compressed. But the movie really gets to its most sublime heights visually. Spectacular.