Recently featured on our fall movie preview, Memoir of a Snail marks the long-awaited return to feature filmmaking from Adam Elliot, director of 2009’s Mary & Max and Oscar winner for the short film Harvie Krumpet. Featuring the voices of Sarah Snook, Eric Bana, Jacki Weaver, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, the film won the top prize at Annecy earlier this summer and will now stop by Telluride ahead of an October 25 release from IFC Films. Ahead of the release, the first trailer has arrived.
Here’s the synopsis: “Grace Pudel is a lonely misfit with an affinity for collecting ornamental snails and an intense love for books. At a young age, when Grace is separated from her fire-breathing twin brother Gilbert, she falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst. Despite a continued series of hardships, inspiration and hope emerge when she strikes up an enduring friendship with an elderly eccentric woman named Pinky, who is full of grit and lust for life. From Academy Award-winning® animation writer and director Adam Elliot, Memoir of a Snail is a poignant, heartfelt, hilarious chronicle of the life of an outsider finding her confidence and silver linings amongst the clutter of everyday life.”
David Katz said in his review, “Grace Pudel (the voice of Succession’s Sarah Snook) is wishing goodbye to her elderly friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who’s currently prone on her deathbed. Once she finally perishes, Grace––who’s somewhere in her 20s, yet wears a black beanie customized with the pop-out eyelids of a snail––parks herself on a nearby bench and begins narrating her life story (in a manner that’s a tad Forrest Gump-ian) to her own pet snail Sylvie, who slowly slithers away as she’s setting herself free. Such events being in early Aardman-style claymation certainly enhances their kookiness. But regarding this animated medium, Memoir of a Snail’s director Adam Elliot (following-up his enduringly popular 2009 feature Mary and Max) prefers the term “clayography”––his own portmanteau of claymation and biography––which does someway capture the uniqueness of what he’s doing. He specializes in exhaustive stop-motion character studies. Which isn’t to say they lack storytelling escalation, but underlines how little we grasped about the likes of Wallace, Gromit, and Jack Skellington’s psychology or motivations. Elliot strongly favors voiceover as a primary tool for exposition––of course, a sin for various theorists of film storytelling––and Memoir of a Snail displays the limitations of combining this approach with his various still tableaux of clay, paint, and paper.”
See the trailer below.