How Memoir of a Snail Came Out of Its Shell

Once upon a time, there was the story of a snail. But it was almost the story of a ladybug.

When Australian animator Adam Elliot wrote the first draft of his new film, Memoir of a Snail (in theatres now from IFC) it was actually called Memoir of a Ladybug. “But then that film Ladybird came out,” he said. “But also, it was getting a bit cutesy and twee.”

After all, this is the story of Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook), a lonely woman in a small Australian community who finds comfort in her ever-growing collection, which starts as a hobby and becomes a wall she can hide behind. Ladybugs were just too charming, Elliot said, “so I started thinking about pigs and ducks and frogs and all the other things people collect, and none of those seemed right, either.”

That’s when he went back to his childhood, when he (like many small boys) collected snails, and to his time in college, when he directed a short involving snails. “If you touch a snail’s antenna, which you’re not supposed to do, then they retract into their shell. And I thought, ‘Well, that’s what Grace is doing her whole life. She’s retracting from the world, and all the pain and trauma she’s having inflicted on her.’”

As a filmmaker, Elliot is often referred to as a stop-motion animator. “There used to be stop-start animation, and frame animation,” he observed, “and there’s Claymation but apparently that’s trademark.” However, he has a preferred term, one that he invented himself (“very pretentiously”): clayography. “It’s now on Wikipedia,” he grins. “So I’m very proud of that.”

The word is a portmanteau of “clay” and “biography,” and while they are not strictly biographical, the characters draw on friends and family “so there’s always a degree of truth to all of them.” In the case of Memoir, Grace was inspired in no small part by the life of a friend of Elliot’s who also was born with a cleft palate. As for her ever-expanding archive of mollusk memorabilia, that comes from his own parents, who he called “extreme collectors” – and, he admits, from his own habits. “We’re all on the spectrum somewhere,” he said. His weakness? “My partner and I used to collect bad taxidermy. But we’ve downsized and now we live a very frugal existence, very minimalist. We’ve got potted plants, and that’s about all we hoard now.”

As part of the writing process for Memoir, Elliot started looking into the psychology of collecting and its tragic shadow, extreme hoarding, “where you add so much sentimental value to a pencil that you can’t bear it. … More often than not that’s to do with trauma and loss, and more often that not it’s the loss of child or a twin or a sibling, and the hoarding becomes a defense mechanism because they can’t handle any more loss in their lives. It’s a shield, a protection, a barrier from the outside world.”

There’s an obsessive element to hoarding – which is something that’s also said about animators. It’s a long, slow process that takes years, especially on a small-budgeted project like Memoir. Elliot compared it to “building an enormous house and going in and putting down one brick every day, but really focusing on that one brick and making sure that that brick is perfect – and not worrying about what the house is going to look like at the end. And then, one day, the house is finished.”

But that means laying a lot of bricks. Elliot explained the scale of the project: three years of scripting through 16 drafts, then five months of storyboarding (which Elliot does by himself, by hand), which then becomes an animatic. Finally, they were able to rent a studio, and the film entered a new phase, with sculptors and set builders and prop makers building everything, including 200 sets, 200 characters, and roughly 7,000 snails that appear in the film. “And everything was made,” Elliot said. “There’s no CGI.”

After 16 weeks of preproduction, finally the animation process started. “The shoot went for 33 weeks, seven animators doing between five and ten seconds of animation per day, or roughly one shot each per day, and then six months of post. … It sounds slow, but compared to other stop-motion features we’re pretty swift.”

That all means an extraordinary level of commitment, especially on a film like this with a tiny budget, and Elliot also learned to lean more into the storytelling skills of his voice cast: After all, it’s cheaper to animate telling than showing, and just as effective. He was also able to call on some of Australia’s most familiar voices, including a small part for the sonorous tones of Nick Cave. However, his greatest joy was reserved for casting Australian acting legend Jackie Weaver as Grace’s (human) best friend, Pinky. “That was a no brainer,” Elliot said. “It had to be Jackie. She just has this real duality of humor and pathos. … She didn’t even read the script. She just went, ‘I’m in.’”

There were similar budget-savvy decisions on the animation side, such as not having legs on the hero puppets for the characters “so we had to do the Muppet technique, and that saved us a lot of time and money.” This was a saving for the two-legged characters, and a further validation of his decision to have snails instead of ladybugs. “They’re easy to animate. You just push them along and add Vaseline as the snail trail.”

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Memoir of a Snail is in theatres now.