Grace Poudel (voice actor: InheritanceThe protagonist, played by Sarah Snook in “The Hunger Games,” is saying goodbye to her elderly friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who is on her deathbed. When Pinky finally passes away, Grace, who is in her mid-twenties but wearing a black beanie with protruding snail eyelids, sits on a nearby bench and begins telling her life story (a bit like Forrest Gump) to her pet snail, Sylvie. Sylvie slowly crawls away as Grace frees her. That all of this is depicted in early Aardman-style clay animation makes it all the more bizarre.
However, when it comes to this anime medium, Memories of a snailAdam Elliott, director of the popular 2009 feature film Mary and MaxElliott likes to use the term “claygraphy,” a term he coined to combine claymation and biography, which captures to some extent the uniqueness of what he does. He specializes in in-depth stop-motion character studies. That’s not to say that there’s a lack of storytelling escalation, but rather that it highlights how little we understand about the psychology and motivations of characters like Wallace, Gromit, and Jack Skellington. Elliott is a strong advocate of narration as the primary means of exposition, which is, of course, a sin for any theorist of film storytelling. And Memories of a snail It shows the limits of combining this approach with a range of still images made from clay, paint and paper.
At best, it’s a form of Australian literary Gothic bound up with Jane Campion’s “loneliness and eccentricity.” Sweetie and An angel at my tableand, in a less convincing moment, the odd drunken Adams TenenbaumsThe film charts the troubled coming of two eccentric siblings, Grace and Gideon (Kodi Smit-McPhee), growing up in rural Australia. It has a touch of magic realism, subjectively distorting everyday events, but it feels rooted in the ’80s and ’90s, as the handwritten postcard, Polaroids and rotary dial phones suggest. Though tied to Grace’s point of view, and allowing some plausible deniability to Elliot’s own, the characters’ acceptance of their outsider status comes with its own judgement of others and perhaps a sense of superiority. The Poudels’ home life, with their wheelchair-bound father Percy, is certainly close to poverty, but they are the only Artist On their block, thank you very much, they spend their spare time on the couch reading fancy reading material, with the camera showing the spines of their leather-bound books in insert shots.
In contrast to Grace’s sartorial makeover, Gideon looks like a grade-school version of The Cure’s Robert Smith, with brooding fringe and black eyeliner over shorts and trainers. The adult character designs take their cues from the gargoyles found in preserved Gothic architecture today, and in particular from the social services women who send them to different foster homes across the country. Grace is placed with a calm but bored childless couple in Canberra, while Gideon is placed with an intolerant evangelical Christian apple farmer in a more rural area. Grace retains her latchkey sensibility and befriends Pinky, an older bohemian who becomes a misfit like surrogate mother and sister, connecting her to the outsider kinship that defined the story. Mary and Max And the endearing, sometimes manipulative way he expresses melancholy.
Memories of a snail It will captivate audiences drawn to innovative animation. It will premiere at Annecy, considered the world’s leading animation festival. As a work of craftsmanship and world-building it is impressive, but questionable when scrutinized as a work of psychological realism, which it aspires to. The attention to detail and the creativity brought to every environment, improved without the use of CGI, really makes you want to lean back, squint your eyes, and worship that this mode of animation is so well suited to expressing dark, surreal imagery and the corridors of the unconscious. (Of course, David Lynch still relies on stop-motion whenever he undertakes a now-rare film project.) The signature humor and quick visual gags are also a highlight of the film. The SimpsonsWe are well into the realm of “adult” animation, a reminder that there will always be a vacancy for a political cartoonist in the payroll of a broadsheet newspaper or glossy magazine: the simple outlines and borders of drawn or sculpted figures, when combined with expressionistic exaggeration, produce laughs more effectively.
But the widespread interest and conclusions about sex would be subject to greater scrutiny if the film were not animated. Memories of a snailThe central motif of is the same throughout, from the revelation about Grace’s adoptive parents, to her belated fetish for her first husband, to the grotesque and humiliating way in which all of the older characters are depicted with their unrequited love and physical aging. It has tinges of adolescence (more as a value judgement and contempt than a depiction that connects to the focus of a YA story), and uses shock and shame to undermine the film’s insight into problematic conditions, but it’s still fun to watch and often very funny.
Memories of a snail It will premiere at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival and will be released by IFC Films.
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