Memoir of a Snail is a harrowing testament to stop-motion animation's power

Isn’t stop-motion animation a joy? It’s amazing to consider that this medium really exists. This filmmaking style is such a painstaking exercise where days are devoted to realizing seconds of footage. All of that toiling away is in the service of making outlandish imagery and characters that move and emote like real human beings. Sword-wielding skeletons, cheese-obsessed inventors, the leads of Coraline, they all come to life with tangible textures. The unreal is real in the hands of these wizards. Writer/director Adam Elliot has now returned to reinforce this medium’s vast potential with Memoir of a Snail.

If you’re one of the lucky souls who has witnessed his previous feature-length film, Mary & Max, then you know Elliot’s specific style of stop-motion animation. Elliot is a man obsessed with grim atmospheres, tormented childhoods, and intentionally abrasive, imperfect character designs. It’s a melancholy filmmaking approach that created cinematic wonders once before. With Snail, he’s again crafted an emotionally brutal movie tapping into realities of hardship through an animated world.

Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) loves her snails. You can tell thanks to that snail hat she's always got on the top of her head. It's one of the many ways she's connected with her deceased mother, who always loved those mollusks. Bringing her even more joy than snails is her twin brother Gilbert. Grace and Gilbert do everything together until fate intervenes to split them apart. Now, the pair are living on opposite sides of the Australian continent. Grace is stuck with a largely absent couple more interested in key parties than attentive parenting. As for Gilbert, he’s trapped on a deeply religious farm belonging to a hypocritical and cruel couple.

Grace divulges these and other stories from her life to her recently released snail, Sylvia. It's a saga of woe that fails to improve even once Grace is living in the proudly safe city of Canberra. At least here Grace finds companionship in the elderly Pinky (Jacki Weaver). She's a woman who has lived countless exciting adventures in her time on Earth. She’s just the perfect friend for somebody like Grace, a woman terrified of coming out of her shell.

Elliot lathers on the ceaseless trauma and tragedy throughout Memoir of a Snail. Rather than all fading together into a dreary blur, Snail's grim atmosphere is rife with specificity to all the suffering. A recurring thread of alcoholism, for instance, defines many tormented adult men in this universe. The drudgery of existence that adolescent characters are just discovering has worn down these grown-ups. All that provides joy in the middle of daily life is the bottom of a bottle. Meanwhile, religious-informed intolerance underpins Gilbert’s anguish at the hands of his adopted mother Ruth (Magda Szubanski).

Memoir of a Snail does not chronicle a world of random, inexplicable cruelty. Grace occupies a land much like our own where brutality has obvious roots. Those roots concern a desire to finally grasp control. People use religion, ableist language, or exploitation of others to feel power for the first time in their lives. This world is innately a challenging domain that damages us all. Many, unfortunately, find it more satisfying to at least feel “superior” to somebody in the middle of such torturous existences. Challenging these hierarchical capitalism-informed systems we inhabit is too hard. Mocking Grace’s upper lip or using religion as a cudgel to justify abusive behavior, that’s an immediate one can make themselves feel superior. Memoir of a Snail’s nastiest characters abuse and torment simply to ensure they’re temporarily no longer on the bottom rung of society.

Having this concept underpin the misery lends real depth, preciseness, and emotional immediacy to Memoir of a Snail’s most harrowing sequences. It helps too that Elliot’s writing and directing never feels like it’s exploiting Grace as a character. She's not a punching bag existing only to endure tidal waves of grief. Emphasizing her narration, perspective, and interests makes this just feel like a more emotionally grueling success than classic coming-of-age stories from authors like Judy Blume. We’re viewing the world through her eyes, not just waiting for the next horrible thing to befall her.

Most importantly, though, Memoir of a Snail is a triumph in animation. There’s a scraggly, imperfectness to this clay-molded world that works spectacularly on many levels. For one thing, there’s an intentionally under-detailed quality to certain sets and props that evokes what our memories look like in our heads. We don’t always remember every crease and corner of the places we inhabit. Memoir of a Snail’s animation style reflects that reality, which solidifies the sensation that we’re watching Grace’s recounting of key past events.

In the past, acclaimed stop-motion animation studio Laika has been gently criticized for making projects like Missing Link look too perfect. Classic stop-motion projects had a jankiness to them and even featured discernible fingerprints on character models. Laika’s films, meanwhile, have smooth movements some have felt to emulate CG animation too heavily. Memoir of a Snail certainly functions at the opposite end of Laika’s default style. Grace and the other human characters move with intentionally jagged body language. Character designs, meanwhile, are unafraid to embrace stylized flourishes like Pinky's gigantic glasses or Guinea pigs made up of eyes more than anything else.

It’s all so strikingly realized. The immense care and craft oozing into every scene is truly remarkable. Somehow, watching such off-kilter stop-motion figures endure the brutalities of reality also hits extra hard emotionally. Not even animated humans visually divorced from “the real world” can escape the slings and arrows of heartache. It’s truly amazing to realize you’ve become so invested in these heightened animated creations. That’s the gift of stop-motion animation. Go to a theater and unwrap Memoir of a Snail to feel the power of that gift.