Memoir of a Snail

Director – Adam Elliot – 2024 – Australia – Cert. 15 – 94m

*****

A young woman recounts her life story to her newly freed pet snail after her best friend dies – stop-frame animation marvel is out in UK cinemas on Friday, February 14th

Following a bravura title sequence which consists of a camera moving around (a scale model set of) detritus from a life, everything from soap on a rope to snail poison, with various objects bearing upon themselves various credits for the film, a young woman has tears in her eyes as her bedridden friend Pinky (voice: Jacki Weaver from Silver Linings Playbook, David O. Russell, 2012; Animal Kingdom, David Michod, 2010; Picnic at Hanging Rock, Peter Weir, 1975) breathes her last, briefly coming back to life to utter the legend, “potatoes”. But what can this word mean?

Taking her pet snail Sylvia (the name is painted on the back of the creature’s shell) out of a glass jar and setting her free to cross Pinky’s garden in the course of her subsequent narrative, the woman remembers her childhood down to the smallest detail, and starts to recount it to the liberated gastropod. She was born prematurely as Grace Prudence Pudel (voice: Sarah Snook from Steve Jobs, Danny Boyle, 2015; Predestination, The Spierig Brothers, 2014), shortly followed by her twin brother Gilbert (voice: Kodi Smit-McPhee from Maria, Pablo Larraín, 2024; The Power of the Dog, Jane Campion, 2021; The Congress, Ari Folman, 2013; ParaNorman, Chris Butler, Sam Fell, 2012). The birthing kills their mother.

Grace grows up suffering, as she puts it, a smorgasboard of afflictions. Eventually, she goes into hospital to have her cleft upper lip fixed; when the operation threatens to go wrong, Gilbert heroically donates his blood for a transfusion, despite believing that such generosity would prove fatal for him. After that, Grace becomes understandably devoted to him. Their father Percy (voice: Dominique Pinon from A Very Long Engagement, 2004, Amélie, 2001, both Jean-Pierre Jeunet; The City of Lost Children, 1995, Delicatessen, 1991, both Jeunet & Caro) gives Grace her mum’s music box, which opens to reveal a rotating, ornamental snail (mum was a molluscologist) and a ring with a snail, which she gives to Gilbert who vows to wear it ‘til the day he dies.

Gilbert protects Grace from school bullies twice their size, rescues snails from being run over on busy roads, and has a pathological love of fire. He is always burning himself, and dreams of being a street artist in Paris like their dad, who used his income from busking to fund making stop-frame animated films. Their mum met him on holiday there. In Australia, hit by a drunk driver, he becomes a paraplegic and, subsequently, an alcoholic.

Life is nevertheless good until their dad dies, when the two twins are separated by Child Services and sent to different foster homes on either side of Australia. Grace’s final view of her brother is on the back of a bus bearing the ironic legend, ‘Greyhound – bringing people together’. Grace is sent to Canberra, “Australia’s safest city”, a place so exciting that newspapers run such headlines as, ‘Potato Chip Found in Shape of Elvis’. Her new foster parents are Ian and Narelle (both voices: Paul Capsis from True History of the Kelly Gang, Justin Kurtzel, 2019), accountants for a place that made traffic lights, addicted to self-help books, whose weekends are filled with games of netball and swingers’ key parties.

Gilbert, meanwhile, has been placed with the family of orchard farmers Owen (voice: Bernie Clifford from Mary and Max, Adam Elliot, 2009) and Ruth Appleby (voice: Magda Szubanski from Happy Feet, George Miller, Warren Colman, Judy Morris, 2006; Babe, Chris Noonan, 1995) who effectively use him as cheap labour. They are also religious (fundamentalist Christian) nutcases who make their kids pray in gibberish four times a day. Grace and Gilbert keep in touch by writing to each other.

Five years later, Grace is volunteering at a library, where, tasked with erasing boy’s rude drawings in books, she meets Pinky who is returning books into a rubbish bin in the belief that it’s a letterbox for book deposit. Pinky is one of life’s true eccentrics, and the pair strike up what will turn out to be a lasting friendship. As Gilbert’s letters suggest his foster family situation is further deteriorating, Grace first undergoes a marriage to Ken (voice: Tony Armstrong) which starts out well enough but later turns toxic, and then embarks on a spate of hoarding and shoplifting. Eventually, she will need to confront this character flaw and let her collected detritus go…

Writer-director Elliot drives his film along with a scripted voiceover narration from Grace telling her story to Sylvia the snail, whose slow journey across Pinky’s garden as a newly freed snail will turn out to have revelatory consequences for Grace. The voiceover is punctuated with the time-honoured device of letters sent between two main characters, in this case, brother and sister. These oral narratives provide the perfect springboard for the director to build Grace’s world, first in terms of an incredible selection of props – Grace is obsessed with snails, permanently wears a woolly snail hat adorned with two eyes on stalks made for her by her father, and amasses a vast collection of snail memorabilia – but also in terms of images and sequences.

Some of these sequences are joyous, like the twins’ memory of going to the fair with their dad and riding on the Big Dipper, or Grace’s first meeting with friend-to-be Pinky or husband-to-be Ken. Yet, most are more melancholy, like each twin’s life with their social-services-allotted foster parents, who turn out to be a bad lot in both cases. In Grace’s case, her swinger foster-parents seem too obsessed with themselves to care; in Gilbert’s, the visuals launch into a full-blown examination of a warped Christian cult isolated from the outside world (aside from the patriarch’s trips to buy whiskey with the children’s designated church collection money). Gilbert’s foster parents have him working for a pittance on the woodshed production line of their apple farm, ironically named Garden of Eden when something like The Gates of Hell would be far more accurate.

Special mentions should go to the character of James the Magistrate (voice: Eric Bana from Mary and Max; Munich, Steven Spielberg, 2005; Hulk, Ang Lee, 2003; Finding Nemo, Andrew Stanton, Lee Unkrich, 2003), defrocked for masturbating in court and subsequently, whilst living as a tramp, shown kindness by young Gracie, an act which pays her back in kind later on; and also to Pinky’s briefly seen two husbands Hector Santamaria (head sculptor Alexander Esenarro Santafe) and Bill Clarke (musician Nick Cave).

Grace may be a melancholic loner, but her kinship with her brother and, later, her friendship with the immediately likeable Pinky lifts the film towards something more optimistic, reinforcing Grace’s belief in the goodness of people even when most of the evidence outside of her brother and Pinky suggests the opposite to be true. Director Elliot’s telling his heroine’s story with stop-frame puppetry – or rather, creating her story as a vehicle for his stop-frame puppetry – renders the characters and the world they inhabit far more watchable than if this had been made in live action.

Every street, every house, every interior makes the viewer marvel at the artistry. It’s even more true of the characters: as Grace begins life with a cleft palate, and an operation to fix that condition, the medium’s simplicity in showing this state makes it readily suited to portraying this, a feat that would have been much harder in ‘realistic’ like action involving special effects. Rendered in animation, the piece possesses an inevitable charm that makes the plight of its characters all the more poignant.

It may be a lot less polished overall than Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl, and it may not be going for humour and gags, yet in terms of character feel and design, storytelling and the riot of visual detail created within its miniature model sets, it’s just as impressive as that film. And just as Wallace & Gromit has a distinctly North of England flavour, so Memoir of a Snail possesses a distinctly Australian sensibility, right down to the historic abuse of children in orphanages, and the feeling for a country with vast desert in the middle and a series of cities on or towards the coast.

The whole thing is a triumph in terms of stop-frame animation, storytelling and Australian identity: full marks to distributors Modern Films for championing yet another brave and unconventional animated feature on our cinema screens. The bittersweet tale even takes on a heartwarming ending as the heroine finally scatters her late dad’s ashes at the fairground on the big dipper in the closing moments.

Memoir of a Snail is out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, February 14th.

Trailer: