Writer and Director: Adam Elliot
Balancing sentimentality with a hefty dollop of Ozzie humour, the stop-motion animation Memoir of a Snail is a bittersweet tale of growing up in Canberra. With references to depression and suicide, Adam Elliot’s film is a darker companion to the Spanish-French Robot Dreams, an adult cartoon, released earlier this year. Whereas the latter had no dialogue at all, the message in Memoir of a Snail is more direct and, perhaps at times, a touch too didactic in its approach.
Elliot’s film begins with a death rattle, heralding the sequence of deaths to follow. Grace Pudel, somewhere in her late 20s, holds the hand of her dying friend Pinky, but this is not the first death Grace has witnessed. In giving birth to her and her twin brother Gilbert, her mother died in childbirth. Later on, their father dies in his wheelchair, leaving the twins orphaned and taken into care. Gilbert is a young melancholic, drawn to books like The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath.
There’s the likelihood that Grace doesn’t know what happened to Plath in real life, as she calls her favourite pet snail, Sylvia, who becomes her constant companion, keeping her, not in a bell jar, but a jam jar. After her father’s death, Grace, with Sylvia, is taken into care by a couple who go off to swinging parties every weekend, leaving their new young charge to fend for herself. Gilbert is sent to the other side of the country to a religious family who grows and sells apples. His life on the orchard farm is awful.
If this all sounds too sad, and it is, a typical brand of Ozzie comedy still makes Memoir of a Snail an entertaining watch. Of course, there is the quirky animation, looking like a Gothier version of Aardman. The snails have googly eyes at the end of their stalks, while the humans seem to have old-fashioned telephone cords for hair. But it’s the coarse humour that delights. When we see Grace’s father performing tricks on the streets of Paris, the crowd greets him with amused oohs and aahs. However, when he tries these tricks on Australian thoroughfares, he’s mostly ignored except for the “wanker!” someone throws at him before a drunk driver runs him over.
Jackie Weaver’s straight-talking, tightly-permed Pinky, named so as she lost her finger to a ceiling fan while performing an erotic dance on a bar top, is someone between Dame Edna Everage and Kath from Kath & Kim. Her performance is the perfect counter to Sarah Snook’s sweetly morose Grace. The star names keep coming with turns from Eric Bana and even Nick Cave.
Memoir of a Snail is definitely not for children, with all its references to sex, abuse and gaslighting. Indeed, its implied audience is one that is aware of those tricky teenage coming-of-age classics such as The Catcher in the Rye, another book that Gilbert reads alongside his sister, she reading Memoirs of a Geisha, as they grow up together. There’s also a nod to meta-cinema as Grace learns how to make stop-motion films herself under the telling pseudonym Edna Average.
But in all, Elliot’s film wears its literary allusions lightly and proves that animation isn’t solely for the kids. It also demonstrates that there are many ways of telling stories of loneliness and depression.
Memoir of a Snail is screening at the BFI London Film Festival 2024.
