There is no pretense of appealing to small children in “Memoir of a Snail.” The second feature film from Australian animator Adam Elliot is downright Dickensian in its dramatic development, except when it careens towards downright gothic twists and turns. If you take Junior with you, prepare to have a long talk about life, death, sexuality, homophobia, fetishism, self-harm, homophobia, and many other loaded subjects that no American studio would ever tackle - well, at least not in an animated movie that must pass for a wholesome family affair to recuperate its budget and make a mint at the box office. Mind you, the movie is wholesome, just not in a commercially palatable way.
The snail of the title is not an anthropomorphic mollusk but a young girl fascinated by this particular slimy animal. So much so that she has made them her whole personality. It is an inheritance of sorts. Her mother, who died giving birth to Grace and twin brother Gilbert, was equally fascinated by them. Father Percy (Dominique Pignon) is a French street artist who followed the love of his life to Australia. Now widowed and unable to properly care for his kids, he wastes away confined in a wheelchair, gentle but hopelessly alcoholic. By origin and demeanor, Grace is an outcast. A cleft palate also sets her apart and makes her the target of incessant bullying at school. Her brother does what he can to defend her, but it’s never enough to stave off the bullies.
Death is as omnipresent as the clay that animates this world. At one point, his camera dollies out of the mouth of an agonizing old crone just as she wails for one last time. Her name is Pinky (Jackie Weaver), the kind of free spirit that lives with a sense of freedom that Grace can barely imagine. She is also her only friend. Entering adulthood with a lifetime of traumas, our heroine regals us with a long-winded flashback that takes us from her early age to the bedside of the dying Pinky.
Elliot is a master of intricate design. He writes his script and creates opportunities to make this particular talent shine. Grace fills the emptiness of her life with every possible iteration of snail-branded paraphernalia. She is a single-minded hoarder. The movie begins with a roving camera surveying mountains of detritus. We get the sense that at some point, our protagonist and narrator arrived at an inflection point, or at least, at such an accumulation of stuff that all her crap came tumbling down. The intricate designs and artisan ship are sights to behold.
Grace’s voice is a miracle of empathy. It’s warm and vulnerable in equal parts. You will be surprised to discover it belongs to Sarah Snook, the Aussie actress who rose to fame as the duplicitous Shiv Roy during four seasons of HBO’s wildly popular series “Succession” (2018-2023). There is nothing further from the ambitious heiress than a dumpy, depressive Grace. There’s also Eric Bana as a judge lost to alcoholism and Magda Szubanski as evil Ruth Appleby - the closest thing the movie has to a downright villain. Szubanski may not be a household name in Hollywood, where she is better known - if at all - as Esme Hogget, one of the owners of the talking pig from “Babe” (Chris Noonan, 1995) and “Babe: Pig in the City” (George Miller,1998). In the underrated sequel - directed by none other than the man who gave us the Mad Max saga - she takes center stage, escorting her porky charge on a perilous trip to a menacing metropolis.
For all the cuteness of the talking animal, “Babe” did not flinch at confronting how animals fare in a world governed by omnivorous humans. You might end up at a butcher shop or a tray at Christmas dinner. This unsentimental clarity must be a feature of people from down under because you can feel it governing the creative choices in “Memoir of a Snail.”
Elliot stages his movie in the recent past. Some cultural signifiers point to the late seventies and early eighties, that is, to the Australia of his infancy. There is a sense of childish wonder in how he reproduces the world around him, married to a nonjudgmental way of looking at social mores. If Grace’s foster parents are objects of mild disapproval, it is not because they are swingers but because they are neglectful of her young charge.
The longest chapter of the narrative takes place in Canberra. The town is the sticks, another manifestation of our heroine’s downgrade in life. Most of the movie occurs there, and Elliot achieves an elusive balance. He makes fun of the place but with some degree of endearment. It plays like a kitchen-sink black comedy made in a world of plasticine. If Mike Leigh made an ode to a self-lacerating emo kid in stop-motion animation, it would look like “Memoirs of a Snail.” Check out the longish episode in which Grace appears to find happiness with Ken, a handsome fellow who seems to love her just the way she is. He even lovingly feeds her milkshakes despite her weight ballooning dangerously. The denouement of this subplot plays like something out of Leigh’s “Life is Sweet.” (1987).
Elliot takes his riskiest swing in the parallel storyline following Gilbert. Far from the cartoonish social realism of the rest of the movie, he sinks the kid in a time-warped rural gothic. He lands in a family of fanatics practicing a makeshift religion centered around the apples produced in their orchards. Far from new-age mumble-jumbo, it is cruel and repressive, a stand-in for any religious system used as a tool to inflict pain. Gilbert and his foster brothers must work to earn their keep. The employers-parents expropriate their miserly wages as a tribute for the almighty apple - we soon learn that the farmer and his wife take the till for themselves. The cruelty achieves maximum levels of sordidness when transgressive young love blooms between two exploited children. The movie takes a grim turn that comes as a shock. Even though we may internalize that animated films are not just for kids, Hollywood has trained us to expect them to always be.
You wonder how Elliot will pull his movie from the bottom of a pit of misery. The truth is, his dry wit is always there to keep you floating just above despair. Grace’s hoarding weakness pushes the Play-Doh craftsmanship to creative heights. The movie offers an abundant visual banquet of sight gags and pop culture winks without the elbow ribbing of most animated movies secretly catering to adults. In the end, he pulls the oldest trick in the book, but it is hard to resent him. “Memoir of a Snail” finds well-earned redemption for our queen of pain.
