A snail doesn’t carry its home on its back. It carries a safe haven that is also a prison. So while Grace Pudel, the most passive protagonist of Australian stop-motion fable Memoir of a Snail, may not have an a actual shell, she has retracted into her life like her favorite invertebrate.
Even though she wears a hat with eyes on antennae, day in and day out, Grace doesn’t look so much like a snail as a rock – dull, low to the ground, and immobile. Like her late mother, she loves those tiny creatures, and it’s to one of her crawling little pals that she recites her life story as she sits on a garden bench.
It’s been 15 years between writer/director Adam Elliot’s last animated feature, 2009’s heart-warmer Mary and Max, and Memoir, which had its Texas premiere at Fantastic Fest. Yet with the level of delicate intricacy of the set and puppets here, he could have spent all that time just working on this project and it would still make sense. As voiced with softness and sweetness by Sarah Snook, Grace lives in a little corner of Canberra (the safest city in Australia) that is mucky and run-down but stuffed with details and little gags. But take the entire city and cram it down into one room, and it still wouldn’t be as elaborately decorated with details as Grace’s home, every inch covered with snail memorabilia and merchandise. Anything with a spiral, it seems, as Grace finds solace, companionship, and familiarity in snails. They’re her silent companions through life – something no human can ever be, as they all either die, leave, or are taken away.
The stop-motion format undoubtedly allows Elliot to ameliorate much of the sadness of Grace’s life with visual playfulness and ingenuity. That’s necessary, since the tragedies that engulf Grace’s life would break any flesh-and-blood human: orphaned, losing her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), schoolyard bullying, adult betrayal, loneliness. Yet, as she says, she’s always been glass-half-full, and she finds friendships – the generations of pet snails that she’s raised, and Pinky (Jacki Weaver), that type of little old lady who has lived the kind of exciting life that anyone would envy. There’s also her connection to Gilbert, which, even though they are divided by a desert, continues through the letters he sends her. They give the film the same epistolary mechanic as Mary and Max, but it doesn’t seem stale or repetitive. Instead, they are stories within Grace’s story, other reminiscences of their mundanely strange world, of Luna Park and Parisian street performers, nudist colonies and playing ping-pong with Castro – all stories that Grace knows but remain alien to her measured, restrained existence.
Yet all that growing isolation only builds the sympathy for Grace. Her name is subtly perfect for how she mostly handles the tough deals life often hands her, although there’s no element of religiosity to her. If anything, Elliot takes a potshot at evangelicals with Gilbert’s adoptive family, a bunch of mirthless weirdos running an orchard and speaking in tongues. Even as Grace becomes more and more of a spiritual gastropod, she retains a deep and sweet humanity, her face worn into a slight smile even as she is dragged deeper into everyday misery.
In this charming, funny, tear-inducing, and instantly recognizable world, and through the (in)actions of Grace, Elliot tells a gentle, touching, bitter-but-ultimately-sweet fable with a warming message: It’s OK to leave your shell behind. Don’t worry, you’ll find out you’re not secretly a slug. You’ll just leave a glittery trail called your life.
This review previously ran during Fantastic Fest 2024.
This article appears in November 1 • 2024.
