Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards.
Forcibly separated from her twin brother when they are orphaned, a melancholic misfit learns how to find confidence within herself amid the clutter of misfortunes and everyday life.
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It feels great to laugh straight after you’ve just welled up. The characters in Memoir of a Snail, the new animated tale from Academy Award winner Adam Elliot, feel authentically real to us - and even though Elliot includes jokes, he doesn’t joke ABOUT them. He lays them bare to us with respect, and imbues his odd menagerie with… well, with dignity. Which is a funny thing to say about something with plasticine eyeballs and glycerine tears. Read our deeper dive into Memoir of a Snail at good.film: https://good.film/guide/theres-nothing-like-memoir-of-a-snail-just-try-not-to-cry
Australian animator and filmmaker Adam Elliot’s last full-length feature film was Mary and Max (2009). Memoir of a Snail is narrated and told from the point of view of Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook). Grace details her life story that finds humor and sentimentality in the face of depression, shortcomings, and letdowns. There are two people in the world that Grace feels comfortable with: her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and her best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver). Their mother died during childbirth and their father is a drunk paraplegic who is a former street performer and animator from France. Grace developed the desire to be an animator while Gilbert wants to be a street performer. After their father passes away, the twins are separated and put into foster homes in two separate states. They spend the majority of the film writing letters to one another and dreaming of the day that they can reunite. As an adult, Grace meets Pinky. Pinky wears giant, red-rim glasses, is covered in wrinkles and liver spots, and habitually smokes cigars. She has traveled all over the world, met countless people, been with only a handful of memorable men, and has lived a crazy life full of no regrets or dull moments. She quickly becomes Grace’s best friend. Grace becomes obsessed with snails at a young age. She keeps live ones as pets in a jar and buys every snail-related knickknack she can get her hands on. She also likes to read trashy romance novels and is constantly eating Chiko Rolls, which are spring rolls that are the size of burritos. If you haven’t seen Mary and Max or his 2003 Academy Award-winning short Harvie Krumpet, Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated style isn’t as smooth and polished as recent Laika or Aardman films have become. Elliot’s stop-motion still looks like it was hand-crafted by humans – visible balls of clay that have been molded into these soul-driven characters that we eventually grow to love. It would have been extremely easy for Adam Elliot to make Memoir of a Snail into a film that emotionally destroys the audience and never looks back. However, the film is written in a way that makes you feel an entire spectrum of emotions over a mere 90 minutes. Anyone who grew up as a loner will sympathize with Grace, especially when devoting your life to collecting something you love. But her story is presented in a way that allows you to laugh at all the terrible things in her life. The characters in the film, no matter how much screen time they’re given, are loaded with eccentricities. There’s a bum who lost his job as a court judge because he liked to masturbate in court, the foster family Gilbert is sent to is a wildly religious one complete with gibberish prayers and apple worshipping, and Grace falls in love with a man in the neighborhood while he’s using his leaf blower. Surprisingly, Memoir of a Snail is R-rated. There’s some mild vulgarity in there and repeated use of the middle finger, but there’s also a shocking amount of nudity. Grace’s foster family has this boring front of designing traffic lights. They create awards for her every week and hang them on her wall to get her to stop being sad about being separated from her brother. But they’re also swingers who like to take exotic vacations purely driven based on having sex with new people in a new place. Memoir of a Snail is an animated film that is as enjoyable on an emotional level as a thought-provoking one. The film has several life lessons that stick with you afterward. Grace, Gilbert, and their father all wrestle with feeling caged in throughout the film, but the difference is who feels like a glass half full, a glass half empty, and just a glass. Made on a rapid 32-week shooting schedule where animators had to complete 10 seconds a day to finish on time, Memoir of a Snail is a small-budget animated film that feels like a handmade labor of love. It’s a film that honors weird people no matter how bizarre they may be. Next to its superb writing and ability to make you laugh while ripping your heartstrings to shreds, that is what makes it so beautiful and memorable.
When an elderly lady gives out her last breath, and yells something about potatoes, we realise that “Grace” is now on her own. She’s a middle aged woman wearing a knitted hat with two big eyes poking from stalks on the top. She’s what you might call a glass half empty sort of person, and as she releases her pet snail “Sylvia” from her jar into the vegetable garden she begins to regale us with the story of just how she, and her long-lost brother “Gilbert” grew up with their paraplegic dad; became orphaned, separated and then how she spent the rest of her life in increasing isolation making some rather unfortunate choices. Indeed, by an early age “Grace” is really only happy living in her room with her collection of gastropods. There’s a lovely melancholy to this story and the dialogue is riddled with typically Australian epithets, sarcasm and very dry wit as the tale of woes upon woes upon more woes is engagingly unfolded over the next ninety minutes, but it’s the astonishing detail of the animation that really stands out here. Right from the beginning, as we tour a home that looks more like an old curiosity shop we see not just great detail amongst the mechanics of the imagery, but there’s plenty of more subtle content hidden in plain sight for us to spot and frequently raise a smile at, too. There’s an enjoyably compelling attraction from her downbeat monologues as she lurches from bad news to more bad news and I thought it had shades of the Tim Burton too it as it edged towards it’s denouement. It’s really superbly crafted artistry this, and though it does put a smiley face on things, it also takes quite a poignant look at family and loneliness too. This is really a film for a big screen if you get the chance, some of the facial expressions are every bit as human as anything people can do for real!
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