By Alex Gilston - October 21, 2024
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards” is a famous quote by Danish philosopher Soren Kierkegaard. It also happens to be one of Adam Elliot’s (Mary and Max) favourite quotes. Therefore, it isn’t too much of a surprise that the saying is the beating heart of his new film Memoir of a Snail; a stop-motion feature eight years in the making. A charming, and equally disarming, tale of one woman and her twin, and the people they meet along the way. With its offbeat handmade feel, darkly slick comedy, and moments of genuine emotional heft, Memoir of a Snail is a triumph.
Grace (Sarah Snook) is growing up in 1970’s Australia with her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee). After the death of her parents she and her brother are separated, and to deal with this she begins to collect snails, and snail themed things. As she grows up, and meets new people, her collection begins to spiral out of control. When her good friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver) dies, she's forced to sit down and recall everything that has happened to her leading up to that point.
Snails can’t move backwards, but it is possible for them to move over the tracks they’ve already made. The entirety of Memoir of a Snail is Grace doing exactly that. She backtracks through her life, self-therapising to one her favourite snails, Sylvia. Sarah Snook’s voice is the first you hear and her omniscient presence stitches the narrative together nicely. Grace is immediately relatable and only becomes more so as more context is added to her life and situation. Being separated from her brother, losing her parents, being bullied, and being lonely too. Her experiences are universal, and it makes it easy to root for her from very early on.
As Grace grows up, and more bad things happen to her, she continues to collect more and more things, which leads to her eventually becoming a hoarder. Memoir of a Snail uses the enormity of Grace’s belongings as a representation of her mental state. Her snail-y themed collection is her bubble wrap, a comfort from the harsh reality beyond her home. Each piece of Grace’s collection is individually hand designed, and theres a lot of it. The scale of the production design is beyond impressive, and its hard to understand how the team managed to pull it off.
At the beginning of the London Film Festival showing Adam Elliot came out to introduce the film. He wanted us to know that the Memoir of a Snail was completely, what he called, “in camera”. This means that there is absolutely zero computer generated graphics. Everything we see on screen is hand made, and clearly with love. This handmade feel adds to the charm on show. Having stop-motion animated studios be at the cutting edge of the form is a beautiful thing, but we can forget that stop-motion is just a bunch of people lovingly crafting a tale with nothing but clay and a camera. Memoir of a Snail reignites this classical love of stop-motion, with its rough but beautiful aesthetic.
The final moments of this are quietly disarming. An emotional crescendo that will leave you with wells of tears in your eyes. Arguably, up until this point, Memoir of a Snail is a bit cynical and sad. Is the moment a bit too sentimental and squishy? Probably, but we’ve spent the runtime falling in love with Grace as a character so the fact she gets a true win is nothing short of spectacular.
In the credits of the film there is a line that reads “This film was made by human beings”. Although Adam Elliot suggest it’s in reference to the fact that no CGI was used, it can’t help but feel like a jab towards the ongoing conversation around the use of AI in filmmaking. Memoir of a Snail is an entire manifesto against it, because it represents everything that AI rejects. AI could never make something like this in a million years. It’s brushed with hundreds of hours of human brilliance. Not something that can simply be produced by a putting a prompt into a text box.
MEMOIR OF A SNAIL RELEASES IN CINEMAS FEBRUARY 2025
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