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Metropolis Japan
26-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Metropolis Japan
Memoir of a Snail
And now for something completely different: Memoir of a Snail. The latest 'clayography' from Australia's Oscar-winning stop-motion animator Adam Eliot is a bittersweet look into the life of one Grace Pudel, a lonely woman who collects romance novels, guinea pigs… and snails. How different? Well, if you've ever had the good fortune to catch one of Eliot's previous works (Mary and Max, Harvie Krumpet), you'll be thinking: Very different, in every conceivable way, often, and generally with surprises from directions you never imagined. Warning: This is a grown-up animation; not recommended for little kids. In contrast to some recent feature-length, big-studio animations, Eliot's unglamorized, emotionally intelligent approach to his story adds to its authenticity. Weird and wonky to be sure, but with an effective intensity, a humanist vibe, and a soundtrack of elegant classical music. It's just a loveable movie. Make you a better person. Voice talent includes Jacki Weaver, Sarah Snook and Charlotte Belsey. (95 min)
The Guardian
15-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Memoir of a Snail review – Adam Elliot's stop-motion animation is brilliantly bleak
Mention stop-motion animation and the first thing that comes to mind is likely to be the amiable claymation creations of Bristol's Aardman studio. But in fact, perhaps more than any other form of animation, stop-motion is a medium that lends itself to darker, more violent themes: the macabre sentient tendrils of Jan Svankmajer's Little Otik; the haunted gothic fairytales dreamed up in the imagination of Tim Burton; the chilling pre-teen horror of Coraline. Add to this list the singular vision of Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot (Mary and Max, the Oscar-winning short Harvie Krumpet), whose tragicomic tales of loneliness, eccentricity and outsider status are told in a glum colour palette that evokes black mould, peeling wallpaper and crushed dreams. Elliot's latest, the multi-award-winning, Oscar-nominated Memoir of a Snail, is archetypal Elliot. The sorry tale of a melancholic woman named Grace Pudel (voiced with world-weary resignation by Succession's Sarah Snook), the film is a catalogue of misfortune. Grace's mother dies in childbirth; she and her twin brother, Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), are orphaned when their depressive, alcoholic father succumbs to his sleep apnoea. And then things get really bad. Grace, like the pet snails she counts among her closest friends, just wants to crawl into her shell and hide from the world. It's bleak, certainly. But what makes this a distinctively Elliot film is not the relentless misfortune but the flashes of mordant humour to be found alongside Grace's hoarded knick-knacks, and the care with which the director handles his damaged, cherished social outcasts. In UK and Irish cinemas
