Having recently watched the charming animation Marcelle The Shell With Shoes On with my nine-year-old son, I was going to suggest for our next movie night we check out Memoir of a Snail. Jolly fortunate that I didn’t, as this is a very different film, recommended for viewers 16+.
Please don’t confuse this with your average Pixar lest your small folk be somewhat befuddled by stop motion on themes of swingers, loneliness, fat-fetish pervs, suicide, dark religious cults, bullying, guinea pigs reproducing at a calamitous rate and other such traumas.
That being said, the above is somewhat delicious for your average adult with a penchant for quirky Australian humour, careful observation and a love of storytelling that deftly balances darkness and light – both in colour palette and emotional sentiment.Set in 1970s Australia, our fallible female lead Grace Pudel, tells her life story in reverse, relaying her experiences to a pet snail called Sylvia, who she is releasing into the wild.
The story, whilst tragic, is told with a remarkable flair for the delightfully peculiar: characters include a paraplegic alcoholic father who was once a street performer in Paris (pictured below); a dead mother whose favourite book was Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar; a geriatric best friend called Pinky who smells of ginger and second hand shops and likes to yell “ya bastard” at traffic and a pyromaniac brother who is forced to work in an apple orchard/cult. But rather than caricature, these relationships weave with poignant moments into an evolving understanding of love and trust.
Within this idiosyncratic world, Australian filmmaker Adam Elliott, much like his protagonist, finds beauty in the smallest details. Grace's obsession with snails (inherited from the mother she never knew) becomes less a quirk and more a meditation on the way we carry our histories with us, our shells both protecting and isolating us from the world.After being separated by social services from her twin brother Gilbert, who is taken to Perth to live with abusive religious fundamentalists, Grace withdraws into herself, becoming a lonely, detached hoarder of snail collectibles in Canberra. When her well meaning, self-help obsessed foster parents grow tired of their key parties and leave for a nudist camp in Sweden, Pinky steps in, and proves that family can be more than a bloodline, ultimately giving Grace the hope and courage to start again.
There is much to be impressed with here – not least the central metaphor of snails but also in the narrative tactic that life can only be understood backwards but has to be lived forwards. "Memoir of a Snail" isn't just a triumph of animation. It's a reminder that some stories need to be told slowly, carefully, with attention to texture and detail - sometimes the most meaningful journeys happen at a snail's pace.
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Below: watch the trailer for Memoir of a Snail
