If Britain’s Aardman has become the studio that has done the most to preserve the art of stop-motion animation, Australia’s Adam Elliot has been the artist who’s advanced it further in terms of visual inventiveness and narrative rigor. Like Jan Švankmajer, Elliot is not afraid of being gross (his movies are often R-rated), but his claymation creations serve more conventional cinematic sentiments like love and courage and family cohesiveness, even if his family units themselves are unconventional. Memoir of a Snail features one that is classically pathetic: twins whose mother died giving birth to them only to be raised by a parapalegic alcoholic French father who dies young, thus condemning them to separation in distant foster homes. The title refers to the structure of the film, since it is narrated by the female half of the sibling pair, Grace (Sarah Snook), who was born with a harelip and from a young age inherited her dead mother’s admiration for land crustaceans, adopting their always forward-moving purposefulness as a means of warding off the despair that continually trespasses into her emotional landscape. 

This despair and the reactive “glass half-full” philosophy that rules Grace’s outlook isn’t presented in a gloomy fashion, however. Elliot has a knack for dark humor that matches his off-whack visual sense—lopsided bodies, squashed faces, and clutter with character. He’s also a master of contrasts. Whereas Grace is all sad-eyed hopefulness, her brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is a dyed-in-the-wool cyno-pessimist with a thing for arson, though given his provenance and the neglect he suffers at the hands of his fundamentalist foster family, you give him not only the benefit of the doubt, but a good chunk of sympathy as he pledges to Grace through long-distance letters that they will eventually be reunited. Before that happens, however, Grace will experience a series of tragicomic misadventures before coming into contact with an iconoclastic old woman named Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who becomes not so much the parent she always longed for, but the friend she always needed to prove her worth as a human being. Pinky allows Grace to be kind by protecting her from the rank cruelty of the world. Elliot’s imagination runs wild with Pinky’s extravagant back story, which includes two dead husbands, a slew of weird jobs, and lots of recreational drugs. Pinky’s late-career vocation is taking care of old people because she herself is entering that phase of her life. But then Grace finds sexual love with a neighbor named Ken, who eventually turns into yet another disappointment and she returns to Pinky, who is showing the first stages of the dementia she always dreaded.

There is more pain to come, including news that Gordon has died in a fire, but Eliot maintains a light comic touch. Though reportedly based somewhat on the filmmaker’s own life, Memoir of a Snail is suffused with enough fantastic elements to qualify as more of a dream than a biography, and Elliot makes the connection with his own career complete in the end with Grace’s self-fulfillment as an artist. In fact, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Snail would have been a title better suited to the film’s transgressive humor, but Elliot would be too proud to pinch somebody else’s idea.

Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Chanter Hibiya (050-6868-5001), Human Trust Cinema Shibuya (03-5468-5551), Cinemart Shinjuku (03-5369-2831).

Memoir of a Snail home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2024 Arenamedia Pty Ltd., Filmfest Limited and Screen Australia