HAVING already won an Academy Award for his short Harvie Krumpet in 2004, Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot is back in the Oscar conversation this year with his latest feature, Memoir of a Snail.
Nominated for Best Animated Feature, Memoir of a Snail is another showcase for the distinctively quirky visual design which wowed the Academy 21 years ago - a signature style Elliot has accurately described as ‘chunky wonky’.
A tearjerker shot-through with pitch-black humour, Memoir is populated by a motley crew of oddball, boiled egg-eyed characters who inhabit an authentically careworn, grubby representation of mid-1970s Australia painted in shades of beige and brown: city pavements are strewn with litter and discarded drug paraphernalia, creepy weirdness lurks behind the superficially cheerful facade of its suburbs, and crazies are mostly left to their own abusive devices way out in the Bush.
The titular story is that of snail-obsessed Grace (voiced by Succession star Sarah Snook), a lonely, sensitive soul dealt a series of emotionally devastating blows from the moment her mother dies in childbirth, leaving Grace and fire-obsessed twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) to be raised by their wheelchair-bound father, Percy (Dominique Pinon), a Frenchman crippled in a bizarre street performance-related accident.
Bullied due to her cleft palate at school, yet more misery awaits young Grace when Percy pops his clogs, thrusting the uber-close twins (“We had two souls but one soul”, notes Grace) into the care of the State, which duly places them with foster families at opposite ends of the country.
Gilbert draws the shortest straw, being sent to an orchard-owning bunch of cruel, religious nuts in rural Perth, while Grace goes to live in Canberra with Ian and Narelle, an outwardly dull, normal couple whose supportive, nurturing approach to fostering is somewhat undercut by an enthusiastic pursuit of swinging-based leisure activities.
Thus, Grace largely finds herself hanging out in the local library with Pinky (Aussie screen legend Jacki Weaver), a sparky Cuban cigar-puffing senior whose colourful life story includes two dead husbands (one voiced by Nick Cave), a mile-high tryst with John Denver and besting Fidel Castro at table tennis.
“Life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards,” notes Pinky, who sadly starts to lose track of her past exploits with the onset of old age.
Eventually, the pair end up co-habiting, but of course that doesn’t have a happy ending either: we first meet Pinky on her deathbed, with a grief-stricken Grace then recounting the years beforehand to her favourite pet snail, Sylvia (named for her late mother’s favourite poet), one of several shell-clad slugs she keeps close company with.
Stacked with superb voice acting led by an affectingly emotive performance from Sarah Snook, the film is an ultimately uplifting tale of outsiders' courage and endurance in the face of almost overwhelming adversity
Never seen without the special ‘snail hat’ knitted by her late father, Grace has very much retreated into her own metaphorical shell over the years and developed worrying hoarding and over-eating tendencies.
The twins yearn to be reunited and maintain a somewhat depressing correspondence detailing their respective trials and tribulations as time marches onward, never quite managing to overcome the distance between them despite Gilbert’s best efforts to escape his abusive, bible-bashing, homophobic adoptive clan in order to resume his role as his sister’s protector.
Given the hard road she’s travelled beforehand, by the time Grace eventually finds love and happiness with a hunky neighbour, Ken (Tony Armstrong), who seems to appreciate her snail-loving quirks and especially her fuller figure, we as an audience are braced for it to end in disaster long before she twigs something isn’t quite right.
Indeed, Grace’s memoir is almost comedically packed with misfortune, an overload of woe that might start to grate were it not for the abundance of sly humour Elliot slips into the piece, not least via blink-and-you’ll-miss-them visual gags like Gilbert waving a tearful goodbye from the back of a bus bearing the slogan ‘Greyhound: Bringing People Together’ to warning stickers alerting people to the sharp edges of the sign celebrating Canberra’s status as ‘Australia’s Safest City’.
Stacked with superb voice acting led by an affectingly emotive performance from Sarah Snook which finds her channelling heartfelt vulnerability into Grace’s dialogue, the film is an ultimately uplifting tale of outsiders' courage and endurance in the face of almost overwhelming adversity, as well as an ode to the alternative families folks fashion when their own blood-based units fall apart.
It deserves to be seen widely, leaving a trail of tearful audiences and awards success in its wake.
Rating: 4/5
Memoir of a Snail is showing at QFT Belfast from today, tickets and showtimes at queensfilmtheatre.com
