Director: Adam Elliot
Writers: Adam Elliot
Stars: Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, Sarah Snook
Synopsis: A bittersweet memoir of a melancholic woman called Grace Pudel – a hoarder of snails, romance novels, and guinea-pigs.
The story is not about an actual snail, but a snail-loving young woman in Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) who wears a snail cap all the time. Talking to an actual pet snail, Sylvia, Grace tells the story of her life and her encounter with the free-spirited Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who has just died. It is a sad tale: Grace’s mother dies after giving birth to her and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee). The dad, Percy (Dominique Pinon), is a former street performer who is a paraplegic and alcoholic after getting hit by a car, leaving Grace and Gilbert to their own devices for the most part. They do, however, still have some fun with their dad, but the siblings are mostly preoccupied with themselves and comforting each other.
Gilbert is protective of Grace, willing to give her blood when undergoing surgery for her cleft lip and stopping bullies from mocking her for it. However, Gilbert is a pyromaniac who wants to become a street performer just like his dad while Grace takes on her deceased mother’s love of snails and gets anything snail-related. Sadly, this happiness ends when Percy dies and child services comes in to send the pair to separate foster homes and they can only communicate through letters. Gilbert goes to a deeply religious family who run an apple farm while Grace goes to a childless couple who are nudists and seem to neglect her.
It is here when Grace meets the elderly Pinky who has had an adventurous life, including making love to John Denver in an airplane. Pinky becomes Grace’s confidant and fills the void left by Gilbert being separated from Grace. Her grandmotherly manners helps Grace gain confidence with herself, especially when she meets a neighbor who becomes smitten and the two move in together. That happiness, not surprisingly, pops with a shocking revelation, returning Grace back to gloom. It is a perfectly paced, scene-by-scene transition with every beat shown clearly and not a single word of dialogue offline.
This is an R-rated animated film, so don’t bring in the kids to see claymation breasts pop out. However, this tragicomedy is one of more emotional films of the year and writer/director Adam Elliot (Mary And Max) absolutely knows when to pull the strings to set off some tears. Accompanied by Elena Kats-Chernin’s score, which can go unnoticed sometimes, Elliot is able to construct every detail with pinpoint accuracy in tone shifting between the years. Being a stop-motion feature adds that authentic feel being not made with CGI and perfectly captures that darkness Elliot wants to capture, his “clayographies” as he calls it.
As a totally Australian production, it feels refreshing to hear the actors speak in their normal accents. You probably would not have guessed that Shiv Roy was the voice of Gracie but Snook’s voice performance matches the right tone for Gracie like telling a bedtime story. As someone who never heard of Adam Elliot and the fact it took over a decade to get this made, it is one of the biggest surprises for me this year and will be for others too. The deeply somber tone of Memoir Of A Snail, how dark and real it can be, removes the fact that this is an animated movie and is one of the more human films in recent memory.
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