{"id":10630,"date":"2025-02-27T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2025-02-27T13:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/?p=10630"},"modified":"2025-02-25T18:31:07","modified_gmt":"2025-02-25T23:31:07","slug":"memoir-of-a-snail","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/2025\/02\/27\/memoir-of-a-snail\/","title":{"rendered":"Memoir of a Snail."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Memoir of a Snail<\/em> is almost too much of a bad thing: Its protagonist, Grace, suffers tragedy after tragedy in her life, confirming her fears about the world to the point that she\u2019s left entirely alone as the film begins and she starts telling her life story. It is so beautifully told, however, that it holds itself together just long enough to get to the finish line, where it all comes together in an ending that brings hope with just a touch of sentiment. (You can rent it on iTunes<\/a>, Amazon<\/a>, etc.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Nominated for this year\u2019s Academy Award for Best Animated Feature, Memoir of a Snail <\/em>is the second full-length film from writer\/director Adam Elliot, who apparently has a reputation for these sort of bleak stories. It follows Grace Pudel (voiced by Sarah Snook), who we see as an adult at the beginning, watching her closest friend, Pinky (Jacki Weaver), die of the most old age. Grace then steps outside to the garden, where she releases one of her pet snails, Sylvia, and then begins to tell the sad story of her sad life, from her birth with a cleft lip, for which other kids make fun of her for years, to when she and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) became orphans \u2013 their mother died giving birth to them \u2013 and then their miserable lives in separate foster families. Gilbert ends up with an evangelical Christian family near Perth, where he\u2019s forced to work on the family orchard and to speak in tongues while praying, while Grace ends up with a pair of nudist hippies who eventually just abandon her. Her life gets worse and worse, other than her friendship with the eccentric Pinky, who buried two husbands in tragicomic circumstances, but has a devil-may-care approach to life and is determined to have a good time.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Pinky\u2019s death is, naturally, the spur that Grace needs to leave the house and go live her life for the first time, although how we get there is part of the magic of the film. There\u2019s probably one tragedy too many \u2013 one of them definitely had me shout \u201cenough!\u201d at the screen \u2013 but there is so much exploration of Grace\u2019s feelings that she ends up one of the best-developed characters in any film this year, live-action or animated. It also means that when she gets a happier ending, the film has earned it, even the one slightly implausible bit (which you will probably see coming) that makes her happiest of all of her new fortunes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Elliotuses stop-motion animation in his films, with a style that naturally calls to mind Tim Burton\u2019s work in the genre, with elements of Charles Addams and Edward Gorey in his characters\u2019 appearances. They\u2019re cute in a grotesque sort of way, especially Grace with her ridiculous snail-hat (it has two ping-pong balls on wires or pipe cleaners, painted as eyes) and Gilbert with his Harry Potter-ish hair. They\u2019re weird, and that makes it easy to see why they\u2019d be bullied and ostracized, and why they\u2019d feel alone and scared of the greater world. It\u2019s also easy to empathize with them, and root for them in their Dickensian circumstances, because he depicts them as real enough to keep them from becoming pathetic. Snook\u2019s voice performance is also fantastic, so much so that she won Best Lead Actress at this year\u2019s AACTA Awards, the Australian equivalent to the Oscars, with Weaver winning for Best Supporting Actress, both over actors who appeared in live-action films.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Best Animated Feature is the only category in this year\u2019s Oscars where I\u2019ve seen all of the nominees, and that\u2019ll probably still be true on Sunday night. I expect Flow<\/em> to win, as it won the Golden Globe and won the Best Animated Feature \u2013 Independent award at the Annies (the most significant awards for animated productions), but this isn\u2019t even a close call; Flow <\/em>is fine, but has no dialogue and very little story, just some beautiful animation work and a bunch of animals who turn out to secretly be civil engineers. It would be my second choice, with The Wild Robot<\/em> third, Inside Out 2<\/em> second, and the very disappointing Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl<\/em> last, because it just wasn\u2019t funny at all.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Memoir of a Snail is almost too much of a bad thing: Its protagonist, Grace, suffers tragedy after tragedy in her life, confirming her fears about the world to the point that she\u2019s left entirely alone as the film begins and she starts telling her life story. It is so beautifully told, however, that it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[1417,1437,1068,161,215],"class_list":["post-10630","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-2024-movies","tag-2025-best-animated-feature-nominees","tag-australian-films","tag-highly-recommended","tag-movies","entry"],"amp_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10630"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10631,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10630\/revisions\/10631"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10630"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10630"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/meadowparty.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10630"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}