Adam Elliot’s feel-sad Memoir of a Snail is beautiful, with a touch of humour

Beautiful to look at and humorous in its reflections on the 1970s, Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail touches on important aspects of being human.

Stephen Romei

@PairRaggedClaws

3 min read

9 hours ago

Grace Pudel in a scene from Memoir of a Snail, a stop-motion animation directed by Adam Elliot.

Recently I described the canine caper Runt as the feel-good film of the year. Another Australian offering, the stop-motion animation Memoir of a Snail, is close to the feel-sad film of the year.

That’s not a criticism in itself. Some stories are sad. Snail, written and directed by Oscar-winner Adam Elliot, is beautiful to look at, humorous in its reflections on the 1970s and touches on important aspects of being human.

However, don’t expect to leave the cinema with a spring in your step, as I did after seeing Runt. And note the M rating. This animated drama is not a children’s film.

Elliot has assembled a terrific voice cast, as he did on his previous films, including the 2003 Oscar winner Harvie Krumpet. It’s clear people want to work with him.

The lead characters are Grace Pudel (voiced by Charlotte Belsey as a child and Sarah Snook as an adult) and her twin brother Gilbert (Mason Litsos and Kodi Smit-McPhee).

They live in 1970s Melbourne and have a tough life. Their mother died in childbirth and their French father (French actor Dominique Pinon), once a street performer in Paris, is in a wheelchair and drinks too much.

Percy Pudel loves his children and the scenes between them are beautiful, as is a flashback to him meeting his wife-to-be in Paris when she was on a holiday won via the Women’s Weekly.

Grace was born with a cleft lip and despite surgery is teased by other children. She’s known as “rabbit face”. Her brother protects her, physically and emotionally. There’s a wonderful animation moment when she cowers in a corner and a snail shell envelops her. Her shell is self-chosen.

She loves snails and becomes a hoarder of snail figurines another objects with snails on the package design, including condoms at one point.

She also has pet snails and her favourite one is named Sylvia, after the poet Sylvia Plath. She wears a snail hat throughout.

The moment that sets up the film comes when Grace and Gilbert are separated. She is sent to live with a swinging couple in Canberra and he is dispatched to a clan of religious fundamentalists in Western Australia. This is their lot as they move into adulthood.

This is also where the absolute star of this movie enters the story. Jacki Weaver as Pinky, a cigar-smoking 80-something woman who has danced in nightclubs all over the world. This local eccentric becomes Grace’s friend – her only friend – and every moment she is on the screen is a treat.

Jacki Weaver is the voice of Pinky in Memoir of a Snail.

The scene where she reminisces about her two dead husbands and the other men in her life, who include Fidel Castro and John Denver, is a highlight that also puts a new twist on Denver’s song Take Me Home Country Road.

She is also the one beacon of hope in this movie. She is someone who lives life to its fullest and, like a snail, does not retrace her steps. “Life is not about looking backwards,’’ she tells Grace. “It’s about living forwards.”

Other big names lend their voices to supporting roles, including Magda Szubanski as the matriarch of the religious family, Eric Bana, Tony Armstrong and, in an other highlight, Nick Cave as a neighbour who takes an interest in Grace. He was “more delicious than a Chiko Roll’,’ Grace confides in one of her regular letters to her brother.

Yet when we learn the truth about this neighbour with the leaf blower – “He wanted to know if he could blow my leaves,” Grace writes – it is sad. Indeed, even the happiest moments in this movie are sad.

Its main themes are bullying, invisibility, reclusiveness, depression, friendship (one of the positives) and, above all, loneliness. It’s worth seeing, not least for Elliot’s incredible use of stop-motion animation, but don’t expect to leave with a smile on your face.