The latest gem from Australian stop-motion maestro Adam Elliot (Harvie Krumpet) comes with the same funny, macabre, bittersweet edge that runs throughout his films.
With 2010’s Mary & Max, he turned a real-life friendship into a dark comedy framed in striking black-and-white animation. Like that film, Memoir of a Snail smudges the line between reality and fiction in deeply moving ways by drawing on its own director’s life.
Grace Pudel is a snail-collecting youngster in 1970s Melbourne. Voiced by Succession’s Sarah Snook, she tells her story delicately but matter-of-factly. The tales of friends, like the adventurous and eccentric Pinky (Jacki Weaver) and the other less charitable folks who try to exploit her, are told with equal gentleness.
Time carries her from one misfortune or cruelty to the next. It starts with the death of her stop-motion animator father, leading her and her brother Gideon (Kodi Smit-McPhee) being sent to separate foster homes, where the latter being subjected to abuse at the hands of devout Christians. The film’s eccentric framing device has Grace telling all of this to her pet snails, whom she’s in the process of freeing, telling all while they slowly creep away.
It could easily be a relentlessly miserable affair. But Elliot finds dark comedy in the awful circumstances of Grace’s life, whether that’s the visual gags of a bus with the apt number plate ‘YRUSAD’ carting off her brother to a separate home, or a social worker’s badge photo showing them puffing on a ciggie. And there’s glimmers of generosity and humanity too, as Grace gradually works up the courage to turn her life around, struggling both with compulsive hoarding and her agoraphobia. A shell of her own making.
It tells a deeply human story about a hard-won route to happiness
Memoir of a Snail’s rough-hewn but meticulous designs flood the screen with wonderful, hand-crafted details. To call it a ‘beautiful’ film is misleading: from the muted colours, sunken eyes and wiry hair of the characters to the clutter and mess of its sets, the effect is, if anything, unsettling. But for all the awkward shapes of the puppets and the exaggerated nature of the sets, the animators’ emphasis on wonky silhouettes and other human touches – and the humanity of the storytelling – makes Grace and her family feel real.
Some character designs raise eyebrows, though: a number are made using a greyish, almost charcoal coloured clay which, generously, borders on racial stereotype.
This misstep apart, Memoir of a Snail is not just a stop-motion animation that feels handmade from top to bottom. It tells a deeply human story about a hard-won route to happiness – with all the pain and missteps that go with it.
In UK and Ireland cinemas Feb 14.