“Memoirs of a Snail†isn’t even close to being an animated movie for kids. But, Adam Elliot’s R-rated stop-motion film is a very fine movie for adults.
Meticulously constructed and filmed with characters made of clay, wire, paper and paint, writer-director-production designer Elliot created a visual world filled with 7,000 handmade objects and using 135,000 photographs (each tiny movement has to be separately shot) to create the 94-minute film.
That technical prowess, however, would have been wasted without its sadly beautiful story of Grace Pudel (perfectly voiced by Australian star Sarah Snook), a lonely woman who, after the death of her only friend, tells her life story to her pet garden snail Sylvia, named after Sylvia Plath whose book “The Bell Jar†is part of Grace’s reading (told you this was a picture for adults).
That story is almost unrelentingly sad. Her mother died in childbirth, leaving her and her twin brother Gilbert (voice of Kodi Smit-McPhee) in the neglectful care of their paraplegic father, who dies in his sleep, leaving them orphaned.
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Since no one wants to adopt twins, Grace and Gilbert are split up, sent to opposite sides of Australia — Gilbert to a farm run by a severe evangelical family that puts him to work putting labels on apples, and Grace to Canberra, where she lives with a couple who are swingers, nudists and could care less about her.
Finding her lonely way through life in the city, Grace becomes ever more withdrawn and drawn to snails, which she collects, live and in ornaments, becoming a hoarder whose house is filled with snail-related junk.
Enter the aforementioned friend, a spunky old lady named Pinky (voiced by the great Jacki Weaver). A stereotype-busting adventurer, Pinky recounts her life to Grace, including playing pingpong with Fidel Castro, as she urges Pinky to come out of her shell and live life.
The film, during which Grace has to endure more cruelties and loss than can be detailed here, is as bleak as it sounds. But, Elliot, and Snook’s voicing, inject some hope as Grace begins to find herself, starting with massive, appearance-changing weight loss.
There’s a self-referential nod in “Memoir of a Snail.†The twins’ father, before his car accident, was a stop-motion animator and he teaches Grace the basic photographic techniques to make a movie — which, in keeping with the movie’s tone — turns out to be a disaster.
Elliot’s film, however, is far from a disaster. He’s crafted some visually memorable characters, with big eyes that fill with tears, and put them in a resonant story of emerging from the bleakest of lives.
