Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail is a heartwarming stop motion film that breaks your soul into pieces before putting it back together again.
Writer & Director: Adam Elliot
Genre: Animation
Run Time: 94′
BFI London Film Festival Screening: October 10-18, 2024
U.S. Release Date: October 25, 2024 (limited)
U.K. Release Date: TBA
Where to Watch: in select US theaters
Adam Elliot is one of those filmmakers who has carved out a niche for themselves. For decades, the Australian stop motion animator has utilised the form to tell adult tragicomic stories about real, everyday people. He calls them ‘clayographies’, a portmanteau of clay and biography. His first film in nearly a decade, Memoir of a Snail, is the seventh entry in his scheduled Trilogy of Trilogies (three shorts, three long shorts like the Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet, and three features like 2009’s Mary & Max). And it is a complex film – droll and quirky, but also very dark in a way that conveys the emotional fragility of its subject.
That subject is Grace Pudel (Succession’s Sarah Snook, with Charlotte Belsey playing her as a child), who regales her traumatic life story to her pet snail Sylvia. As a child in the 1970s, Grace was born prematurely and with a cleft palate. That led to bullying at school, though she was protected by her twin brother/aspiring firebreather Gilbert (Elvis’ Kodi Smit-McPhee, with Mason Litsos as the younger version).
There were other hardships for the siblings. Their mum died when they were babies, and dad Percy (Dominique Pinon, Amélie) was a former animator and street musician who became a paraplegic and alcoholic. And when he dies, the two are placed in separate foster homes on opposite sides of the country. Gilbert joins a family of religious fundamentalist apple farmers in Perth. Grace moves in with a swinger couple from Canberra (“the safest city in Australia”). However, hope for her emerges when she becomes friends with an eccentric octogenarian named Pinky (Jacki Weaver, Animal Kingdom). Perhaps she will bring the snail-collecting Grace out of her shell (pun intended).
This description belies the fact Memoir of a Snail is full of rich characters. There is a talented Aussie cast here, including Nick Cave as one of Pinky’s former husbands, or Eric Bana (Force of Nature: The Dry 2) as a former magistrate caught doing something rude on the bench. There is also a man named Ken (TV presenter Tony Armstrong), who partakes in the Japanese art of kintsugi (fixing broken bowls with the cracks highlighted in gold). He says she wants to fix Grace and her emotional cracks, though that comes with an ulterior motive. Moreover, a cornucopia of sight gags and literary references (snail Sylvia is named after the author Sylvia Plath) make the film consistently funny.
Stop motion is a fascinating creative form for the hard work that goes into it, and Elliot’s version has a load of hand-made elements. You sense that immediately, with the opening credits constituting a single shot sifting through a stacked collection of items. Meanwhile, the world Elliot creates is full of beige, slightly bleak sets and unconventional-looking characters. The latter adds to his stories about outsiders he has based on the people around him. That is the biographical part of his ‘clayographies’, and it feels particularly pronounced here.
Elliot based Grace on a friend who was also born with a cleft palate, whilst her stop-motion aspirations (which she takes from her father) cross in the meta. Then there is her avid collecting of snail-based memorabilia, which soon consumes her foster home. Like Luna Carmoon’s Hoard, this is hoarding done to fill a gigantic void. A coping mechanism for loss. For loneliness, misfortune and death (which sometimes comes in grizzly, gallows humour-style circumstances). The snail becomes an obvious metaphor for Grace and her struggles. It is not only because her mother loved snails – reinforcing the emotional attachment that she lost – but because her hoarding acts as a shell that protects her. Elliot even uses a match fade of Grace in a shell to enforce that link.
Enter Pinky and her fascinating backstory. She was an exotic dancer at a schnitzel bar. She played ping pong with Fidel Castro. She made love to John Denver (in a helicopter). She has lived life to the fullest despite – as is revealed later – a traumatic past. She doesn’t dwindle on that pain, choosing instead to visit the lonely and hold their hand every week. She becomes the kindred spirit that Grace needs.
“Life isn’t about looking backwards, Gracie; it’s about living forwards,” Pinky says at one point, and that is pretty much the motto of Memoir of a Snail. It can be a little relentless in the misery it inflicts on its characters (especially Gilbert). But it is ultimately an endearing animated film about the triumph of enduring hope and kindness in the face of everything, with Sarah Snook and Jacki Weaver bringing deep empathy and warmth to their roles. Yet the reason this works so incredibly well is that Elliot is able to expertly find and express in his stories the twinned senses of humour and pathos. Joy and darkness. Little moments that you mourn and find pleasure in.
Subsequently, you get a crushing but ultimately heartwarming story that breaks your soul into pieces and then puts it back together again. In a sense, it is cinematic kintsugi.
Memoir of a Snail will be screened at the BFI London Film Festival on October 10-18, 2024 and will be released in select US theaters on October 25, 2024. Read our list of 30 movies to watch at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival!
