Review: Memoir of a Snail – Coming out of her shell
Directed by Adam Elliot
Starring Sarah Snook, Eric Bana, Jacki Weaver, Nick Cave
8/10
From the auteur of the incredible film Mary and Max and the incredible short film Harvie Krumpet, Adam Elliot continues with his stunning brand of housing kooky outcast characters in a darkly fun claymation style. This is a touching new film that, through its near constant narration of reminiscing, fills a whole life story into a 94-minute film.
Grace (Sarah Snook) is recounting her life to her pet snail. She goes over her troubling childhood: her mother died giving birth to her and her twin, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-Phee), her acrobatic father became a paraplegic alcoholic, and she is bullied relentlessly at school due to her cleft lip.
Things get even worse when the father dies and the twins are separated, sent away to foster homes in entirely different states. Grace has to grow up even more alone than before, and that’s certainly not the end of all her heartbreaks. Yet as much as the film seems to heap the woes on poor Grace, she finds a strong friendship with the kooky Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who provides a fun path of light for Grace to navigate the world in.
Despite all the hardship and brutal life lessons, Memoir of a Snail is a charming film right up to its end, with some payoffs being a bit too obvious but others being purely satisfying. There’s a good amount of humour and pathos blended through the film to give it a good mix of the light and dark of life, even if it heaps on the sentimentality a little too obviously at brief parts towards the end.
And what’s to be said about the claymation style is obvious: it’s a stunner! Adam Elliot claimed that this low-budget film had to take some shortcuts with the animation here and there (like cutting down on lip syncing), yet it still looks like a hundred million dollars. The detail is not only a wonder to look at but makes up this specific ‘70s set Australian setting so successfully. No Oscar nomination for Best Animated Feature for this one would be complete robbery.
Memoir of a Snail sits on an M rating, so it’s up to parents if their older kids can see it (Adam Elliot in our interview says mostly teenagers and over). But the animation can’t help but appeal to the kids, who will get a kick out of the dark sensibility of the enjoyably cartoonish yet sinister claymation.
Australia should be so proud to have Adam Elliot making such great films out of this country (and this country should give him all the money he needs for his projects). This film has a very intimate quality that comes from both the closeness it has to its characters and its earthy-feeling claymation.
DAVID MORGAN BROWN