MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is a stop motion movie, not trying to be edgy but not appropriate for (most) kids, kind of like a pretty dark indie comedy, except done with clay figures. I haven’t seen MARY AND MAX, the previous feature from writer/director Adam Elliot, so I don’t know how similar or dissimilar they are, but from my experience this is a very unique use of the medium, constantly narrated, and full of quirky novelistic detail and digressions.
Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook, PREDESTINATION) is a human, not a snail, but she does wear a snail hat. She’s an odd kid and an outcast, made fun of for her cleft lip, and only her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee, DOLEMITE IS MY NAME) will stand up for her. When their dad, Percy (Dominique Pinon, DELICATESSEN), an alcoholic ex-juggler, dies in his sleep, the twins are given to separate foster families, communicating only through letters. At the start of the film Grace’s only (human) friend has just died, and she’s telling the whole story to her pet snail Sylvia.
Grace misses her brother terribly, but she makes out okay in the foster family lottery – she gets a swinger/nudist couple, Ian and Narelle (Paul Capsis, TRUE HISTORY OF THE KELLY GANG), who kind of overdo the loving parent bit, constantly leaving her encouraging Post-It notes and stuff. But you’ll come to appreciate them after you see Gilbert’s family, the Applebys. Ruth (Magda Szubanski, BABE) and Owen (Bernie Clifford) are strict Christian fundamentalists who speak in tongues, forbid technology, and put the poor kid to work hand-stickering the apples from their orchard.
Without her twin, Grace is very lonely and depressed. The snail of the title refers not only to her pets, but her obsessive collecting of anything adorned with or shaped like a snail. It’s cute at first, but becomes straight up hoarding. There’s also a grim and dry joke that as her life goes on and she loses more loved one she begins to accumulate a pretty decent collection of cremated remains.
I wasn’t sure how much time passed. I thought she was still a kid when suddenly she was dating and then marrying Ken (Tony Armstrong), a manly microwave repairman who moves into the neighborhood. Even if that was gonna work out, things get very dark when she receives a letter from Ruth informing her that (spoiler) Gilbert has died in a fire he set himself. The bitch caught Gilbert and her son Ben (Davey Thompson) in a relationship and gave them electroshock. Savage shit. Of course Grace’s depression spirals.
It’s a movie full of sadness and tragedy, but the heart of it is Grace’s friendship with Pinky (Jacki Weaver, ANIMAL KINGDOM), an old lady she helps out and becomes close to. Pinky has been through all kinds of horrible shit but always keeps a positive attitude.
As I often mention, I had to experience both of my parents and my grandmother degenerating from Alzheimer’s, so it can be really emotional for me to see it portrayed in movies, and I think this is the first time I’ve run into that in an animated movie. Pinky gets dementia, it’s a pretty accurate portrayal, and Grace becomes her caretaker. But she’s such a funny character, the friendship is so sweet, and it especially captures something I saw with my Grandma, that even as her memory went her personality was still evident. This is a movie that understands that an optimistic outlook can be warmer and sturdier if you had to hack deep into the cold, dark clay of despair to get to it.
The characters have a blobby, lumpy sort of design style that I probly wouldn’t like in drawings but the way they look as moving three dimensional figures in detailed, artfully lit sets really works for this story, as does the sickly brownish color scheme.
One thing I love about stop motion is that re-creating the world in miniature makes every single prop or set worth appreciating. Mundane objects you would never give a thought to in regular size become interesting to stare at in animation because you know they’re not real and get to admire the little observational touches that help them capture the look of the real thing, as well as the little hand-made imperfections or intentional stylizations. Grace lives a life of clutter, and the credits are written on junk piled in a messy room, with sweeping motion control camera moves. It’s all so cool but when she eventually starts to streamline and declutter it turns out to be a huge relief. We didn’t know how much all that visual information was suffocating us.
This was made in Australia, and it’s a very Australian movie, set in Melbourne, Canberra and Perth, and featuring not just the voices of Snook, Weaver, Smit-McPhee and Szubanski but also Eric Bana (MUNICH) and Nick Cave (JOHNNY SUEDE).
After watching the movie I read a little bit about director Adam Elliot. Some places refer to this as being an autobiographical movie, and you will note that Grace becomes a stop motion animator at the end. And he was born with a physiological tremor that maybe relates to Grace’s cleft lip. But maybe this quote from a Variety interview is more accurate: “All my films are extremely personal. All the characters are extensions of myself or people that I am close with… My family always gets nervous when I start writing a script and asks, ‘Who’s gonna be next?’”
One detail I read was that his dad worked as an acrobat and clown, so as surprising as it may seem the part about her dad being a juggler isn’t just some forced quirkiness. That’s real shit. And it makes sense that you’d need someone who walked the walk to make a movie like this. I’m glad the Oscars got me to watch it.
Yes, although it took me a while to finish my review, this was another Oscar nominee completism watch. MEMOIR OF A SNAIL is somehow only the second R-rated movie to ever be nominated for Best Animated Feature, and the other one was also stop motion – ANOMALISA.
The other nominees this year were FLOW, INSIDE OUT 2, WALLACE & GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL and THE WILD ROBOT. I thought FLOW deserved its win, and this would probly be my second choice, though I also liked THE WILD ROBOT. WALLACE & GROMIT: VENGEANCE MOST FOWL was pretty funny and had a nice pro-human/anti-AI message, but that’s about all I remember. INSIDE OUT 2 was arguably okay I guess but it has radicalized me against Pixar movies where the premise of the world can’t be explained without a run-on sentence. I’m okay with “it’s the modern world but with fantasy characters” or “toys are alive when we’re not looking” but I’m done with “emotions are little people who live in a control room inside your head and when you hit puberty some new ones come in and the old ones are in charge of your Sense of Self based on memories which are little glowing marbles that come through a Recall Tube and the emotions can fight for control of what you do and put each other in the Memory Vault or—”
I’m seriously not making any of that up. Jesus christ, read the wikipedia summary of that movie, it’s a fucking nightmare. How did we get here, Pixar? And how do we go back? I guess by finding more idiosyncratic artists like Elliot and letting them do their own freaky thing instead of self-consciously trying to re-engineer a formula that worked in the past.
