Memoir of a Snail

It feels great to laugh straight after you’ve just welled up. The characters in Memoir of a Snail, the new animated tale from Academy Award winner Adam Elliot, feel authentically real to us - and even though Elliot includes jokes, he doesn’t joke ABOUT them. He lays them bare to us with respect, and imbues his odd menagerie with… well, with dignity. Which is a funny thing to say about some...

Australian animator and filmmaker Adam Elliot’s last full-length feature film was Mary and Max (2009). Memoir of a Snail is narrated and told from the point of view of Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook). Grace details her life story that finds humor and sentimentality in the face of depression, shortcomings, and letdowns. There are two people in the world that Grace feels comfortable with: her twin brot...

When an elderly lady gives out her last breath, and yells something about potatoes, we realise that “Grace” is now on her own. She’s a middle aged woman wearing a knitted hat with two big eyes poking from stalks on the top. She’s what you might call a glass half empty sort of person, and as she releases her pet snail “Sylvia” from her jar into the vegetable garden she begins to regale us with the ...

It’s been a long time since I’ve been moved by a piece of cinema as much as I was with “Memoir of a Snail,” a dark, profound, and highly personal stop-motion film from writer / director Adam Elliot . This work of animation confirms the power of the medium as a vessel for mature, deeply philosophical storytelling, and it’s just a beautiful film from start to finish. Crafted with painstaking deta...