Review: Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024) - Fantasies in the Trash Heap

Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024) - Teaser Trailer.

Memoir of a Snail (Adam Elliot, 2024), the stop-motion story of Grace (or Gracie) a young mollusc-obsessed girl growing up in 1970s Australia, is not a fantasy film. Unless, of course, it is entirely a fantasy. As Grace thinks back over her life, and how she found herself in the ‘present day,’ she offers her pet snail Sylvia (and by extension the audience) a tale as bizarre, incongruous, and carefully curated as the vast array of snail-related memorabilia she has collected over the years.

The film marks Adam Elliot’s second feature, following 2009’s Mary and Max. The fifteen-year hiatus, and the well-publicised fact that the film took eight years to develop, lend a tangible significance to its construction, the compiling and bringing together of a motion picture. These are discourses that accompany the release of any major stop-motion film, highlighting the medium of tactile puppetry over narrative content, which positions Elliot’s work as a piece of craft beyond that of? a movie. That the film premiered, and subsequently won the Cristal for Best Feature (Lang 2024), at the recent Annecy International Animation Film Festival, adds further weight to this significance. Memoir debuted amongst a hectic and crowded programme showcasing the cutting edge of contemporary animation across a number of styles, media, and methods. It therefore debuted at a point in which the direction of contemporary animation is being fiercely debated. 2024 marks the first year in which short films created using generative AI have been included in the line-up, while major releases like Inside Out 2 (Kelsey Mann, 2024) (Fig. 1) championed hegemonic mainstream 3D animation, and The Glassworker (Usman Riaz, 2024) (Fig. 2) represented Pakistan’s first ever hand-drawn animated film.

A film’s choice of medium has to matter. If an animated film is to be made using stop-motion, this should not be purely aesthetic, or economic, or done simply to prove your steady-hand and patience over the course of an eight-year project. Whatever story you tell must be enhanced by the medium, else you run the risk of gimmickry. Memoir of a Snail celebrates its use of objects, eschewing all CGI technologies to offer an entirely material, entirely tactile, hand-crafted film. The audience’s attention is drawn to this immediately, during an imaginative title-sequence in which the camera pans over a static jumble of discarded objects, evidence of Gracie’s hoarding instincts. It is a cute and creative scene, but does a character’s affinity for objects really justify the use of such a painstaking, fiddly medium?

Perhaps not, but it is right here, at the start, that we see the beginnings of a fantasy. As the camera pans, the necessary titles appear scrawled across these objects. Elliot’s own name comes to us branded across a toilet basin. It is an irreverence towards the self that challenges dominant discourses on stop-motion that valorise what Donald Crafton (1993, 12) calls the “hand of the artist,” dismissing the animator as part of the trash and redirecting attention to our main character, the quiet and unassuming Gracie, looking haggard and weighed down by something far heavier than the silicone of which she is composed. Over the next ninety-four minutes, many of the objects we see are contextualised, their origins explained, their significance revealed. At the same time, our picture of Grace Puddle is formed. Not just another of Elliot’s playthings, Grace becomes a fully rounded out person, while simultaneously flickering from object to subject, asserting her own authority or numbly submitting to the whims of others, be they drunken father, abusive partner, or the bureaucracies of Australian social care (Fig. 3).

**Fig. 3 - *Memoir of a Snail* (Adam Elliot, 2024).**

The gritty realities of a dispossessed person forgotten by the state and doomed to a life of isolation sounds far too mimetic, too real, to lend themselves to a comfortable fantasy. And it is true you will find no dragons here. At no point do the snails start to speak to Gracie, though the poor woman suffers enough you would not blame her for her delusions. But as the title reminds us, this is in fact a memoir, a recollection. Gracie, undeniably, has suffered, and yet she maintains a sunny optimism, a gentle stoicism that protects the very spark of kindness that leaves her vulnerable to abuse in the first place. Her tactile materiality, in addition to stressing her affinity with objects and slimy shell creatures, serves as an ever-present reminder of the constructedness of her story.

Carla Mackinnon writes eloquently on how stop-motion is often assumed to ensure “authenticity,“ that is ”a truer link to the physical origins of the image” (2019, 100). This, she suggests, implies an urgency, a sense that these stories could only be told by their creator. Except as Elliot’s playful dismissal of his own importance reminds us, there is a disconnect here. He is merely enabling the story of his strong central character, voiced with overwhelming pathos by Succession’s Sarah Snook (Fig. 4). Her words address the audience, giving rise to the images we see on screen, images that are openly and unavoidably synthetic, no less curated and distant from reality than the trinkets Grace uses to shield herself from the harsh realities of her life. What, really, is the difference between these coping mechanisms? As Gracie recalls the episodes of her life, sometimes hysterically surreal, sometimes achingly beautiful, sometimes bafflingly heartbreaking, her ersatz, snail-led therapy allows her to make sense of things. We, the audience, are kept at a distance, denied entry to the reality of the situation and left to make-do only with Grace’s perspective. But given how charming and self-effacing she is, that’s maybe not a bad thing.

**Fig. 4 - Grace in *Memoir of a Snail*.**

Memoir of a Snail may lay bare the inherent fantasy at the heart of any autobiography, but it does so in a gentle and disarming way. Grace has no agenda; she is not trying to cast herself in a better light or defend an untenable position. If anything, she is simply trying to soften the edges. And as the film lumbers towards a perhaps inevitable conclusion, it is hard not to root for her, to buy into her exaggerations and caricatures. She deserves to live in a world of larger-than-life characters, a jerky and knobbly world reminiscent of the comforts of children’s television, a world in which things may bend and break, but they usually work out in the end.

**Article published: June 21st, 2024**

References

Crafton, Donald. 1993. Before Mickey. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press.

Lang, Jamie. 2024. “‘Memoir of a Snail,’ ‘Flow’ Split Feature Honors at Annecy, ‘Percebes’ Wins Best Short.” Variety (June 15, 2024), available at: https://variety.com/2024/awards/global/annecy-winners-memoir-of-a-snail-flow-percebes-1236039204/

MacKinnon, Carla. 2019. “Autobiography and Authenticity in Stop-Motion Animation.” In The Crafty Animator, edited by Caroline Ruddell and Paul Ward, 99-126. London, Palgrave Macmillan.

Biography

Markus Beeken graduated with a BA in English Literature from Brasenose College, Oxford and an MA in Film Studies from King’s College London. He is now studying for his PhD at King’s College London.