By Sandra Hall
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL ★★★★
(M) 94 minutes
Australian writer-director Adam Elliot’s celebrated “claymation biographies” are definitely not for children. They’re beguiling animated films about outsiders who labour under so many adversities that you might give up watching in despair if their poignancy were not lit with such gentle humour.
Grace Pudl, the narrator and main character of Memoir of a Snail.
They’re true originals, distinguished by Elliot’s lack of interest in CGI. Instead, he focuses on clay figures and hand-crafted miniatures to build a world that looks oddly off-kilter yet thoroughly lived-in – an idiosyncratic retreat from the harsh realities surrounding it.
Memoir of a Snail is a follow-up to his earlier features, Mary and Max, narrated by Barry Humphries, and the Oscar-winning Harvie Krumpet. All of his films have attracted well-known actors to their voice casts, and Memoir of Snail is narrated by Sarah Snook as Grace Pudel, a girl whose collection of snails gives her some solace from the tragedies that have shaped her past. Like them, she’s done her best to grow a protective shell, and we catch up with her as she’s regaling her favourite snail, Sylvia, with her life story.
It’s a tale populated by eccentrics, starting with Grace’s father, a French magician whose alcoholism does nothing to deflate his habitual geniality. She and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are already motherless when her father dies, and social services take over, heartlessly separating the pair of them.
Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), Percy (Dominique Pinon) and Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) at Luna Park in Memoir of a Snail.
She winds up in the unreliable care of foster parents, Ian and Narelle (both voiced by Paul Capsis), a couple of swingers whose addiction to sex parties means she’s on her own for most of the time, while Gilbert’s is a much tougher fate. He’s sent off to the other side of the country to endure a life of forced labour with a family of religious fundamentalists.
At this point, you start wondering how much more of this gloomy scenario you can take, but there’s something about Grace’s deadpan tone that keeps hope alive, especially when she comes across Pinky (Jacki Weaver), an elderly neighbour whose string of misadventures have only served to make her more buoyant with the years. To Grace, she’s an inspiration.
At first sight, Elliot’s visual style seems deliberately perverse in its fascination with the bumps, blemishes, wrinkles and wobbles that form his characters and the refuges they construct for themselves, but as you get to know them, you find that their imperfections are what make them so endearing.
They’re not cute or playful like Aardman’s claymation characters, nor do they have the gothic flourishes of Tim Burton’s creations. They’re firmly rooted in real life, and we keep company with them by exploring everything that can go spectacularly wrong in a supposedly humdrum human existence.
All the extremes are here – sex, birth, death, cruelty and the remorseless exploitation of the vulnerable – and the fact Elliott manages to extract such joy from this carnage makes his work remarkable.
Memoir of a Snail is released in cinemas on October 17.
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