Memoir of a Snail

It feels great to laugh straight after you’ve just welled up.

The characters in Memoir of a Snail, the new animated tale from Academy Award winner Adam Elliot, feel authentically real to us - and even though Elliot includes jokes, he doesn’t joke ABOUT them.

He lays them bare to us with respect, and imbues his odd menagerie with… well, with dignity. Which is a funny thing to say about something with plasticine eyeballs and glycerine tears.

Read our deeper dive into Memoir of a Snail at good.film: https://good.film/guide/theres-nothing-like-memoir-of-a-snail-just-try-not-to-cry...

Australian animator and filmmaker Adam Elliot’s last full-length feature film was Mary and Max (2009). Memoir of a Snail is narrated and told from the point of view of Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook). Grace details her life story that finds humor and sentimentality in the face of depression, shortcomings, and letdowns.

There are two people in the world that Grace feels comfortable with: her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) and her best friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver). Their mother died during childbirth and their father is a drunk paraplegic who is a former street performer and animator from...

When an elderly lady gives out her last breath, and yells something about potatoes, we realise that “Grace” is now on her own. She’s a middle aged woman wearing a knitted hat with two big eyes poking from stalks on the top. She’s what you might call a glass half empty sort of person, and as she releases her pet snail “Sylvia” from her jar into the vegetable garden she begins to regale us with the story of just how she, and her long-lost brother “Gilbert” grew up with their paraplegic dad; became orphaned, separated and then how she spent the rest of her life in increasing isola...

It’s been a long time since I’ve been moved by a piece of cinema as much as I was with “Memoir of a Snail,” a dark, profound, and highly personal stop-motion film from writer / director Adam Elliot . This work of animation confirms the power of the medium as a vessel for mature, deeply philosophical storytelling, and it’s just a beautiful film from start to finish.

Crafted with painstaking detail, the film is a bittersweet memoir of Grace Pudel (voice of Sarah Snook), a woman overcome with melancholy in 1970s Australia. When she was younger, Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (voi...