Memoir of a Snail
Memoir of a Snail
What could be worse than the shells that other people place us in our lives? The shells that we place on ourselves. This notion of invisible baggage that people possess, in addition to normal stuff, such as insecurity and grief and its more abstract sister ‘trauma’ forms the essence of Adam Elliot’s remarkable directional massacre of stop motion ‘Memoir of a Snail’ whatever animated film you have seen this year will not be like this. This is one beautiful movie, but this is also an intelligent film so to speak that maneuvers in between the comedy and the tragedy of a particular people’s life because it believes in the ancient saying that life is lived only in one direction ‘forward’.
” Sarah Snook (Of “Succession” fame) mentally twinkles as Grace, who is narrating her life events to her pet snail Sylvia, right after the death of the only loved one, her friend Pinky, who is portrayed by Jakki Weaver’. Grace is no stranger to sorrows. Her mother died during labor. Her father was a paraplegic who was too soon gone and both Grace and her twin brother Gilbert, voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee as an adult, were left without parents. The twins were separated after Dad died with Grace going to a couple of swingers and Gilbert going to fundamental sift and a family on another part of the country to them. Memoir of A Slug is a story about twins Grace and Gilbert the latter who never met, exchange letters promising each other to be together as soon as possible no physically more than the life skin layer allows.
Simply being an animated feature doesn’t prevent “Memoir of a Snail” from being described as one of the most thematically rich films of this year. To some extent, Elliot appears to be building an imaginary world that is heavily influenced by Jacques Tati’s Delicatessen and Amelie, with the help of JPJ regular Dominique Pinon behind the voice cast. Some parts of the film may have an over the top fantasy treatment but everything is just real enough for its feelings to be felt. So don’t expect snails to start talking. What in many ways is a very normal life is told here so beautifully that any ordinary life becomes extraordinary. One more this time technical comment regarding this film’s collage, I would be very short about one of this year’s best scores – Elena Kats-Chernin’s “Memoir of a Snail” which all inclusively enriches the film so much that it becomes one of the characters. It is very important for this film.
That lingo is filled to the brim with words, sentiments and parallelisms. It is very rare to encounter a stop motion film that includes references to Sylvia Plath, the Lord of the Flies, and Cahiers du Cinema. Nevertheless, the author of the equally brilliant ‘Mary and Max’ is an even better writer, which is a talent often taken for granted in an artistic field that is predominantly wedded to images. It is a delicate spine stitch eBook, character development. Much as the greyness of Grace’s tale had its moments when it threatened to suffocate you, Elliot switches to celebrate the chaotic beauty of the universe, where you are reminded of how a snail cannot retreat, and we too cannot. That is the point. At certain point, however, when we feel as if it is all too much, a kind act of a stranger, the image of a deceased friend, a good novel or another movie may turn things upside down.
“Memoir of a Snail” is one of those more sweet natured works where every frame and every line seems to have been put through some vigorous scrutiny yet it is not overly verbose. Some may counter and tell that in order to feel something and indulge in the film, it should have contained a breather of sorts, however that is not how narratives of this kind progress. Since, in order to reach that stage, Elliot has to first record the entire life of Grace up till now, he is free to include so many subplots including the childhood complex Judith grew up bearing because of some bullies, or Gilbert’s awful stern family and even how Pinky tries to escape from all those people who want to help her. It is no wonder that the joy of Pinky’s life is important to the film ‘Memoirs of a snail’, it is to such class of films that there is a kind and all indispensable even at the most negative endpoint of grace.
To say that Elliot’s script is too full of ideas is selling it short because people can use different parts of it in their lives. It’s just a line about Grace’s future husband that seems to be subjecting me all along. He enjoys mending the pieces of sham ceramic that have been cut into pieces but repairs them haphazardly where the piece can easily be seen as broken. ‘Nothing is beyond fixing and our brokenness should be celebrated’. When we shed some exoskeletons that we have wore in life they don’t just fall off easily. There are still some faint lines visible. But those lines too we can choose to appreciate.
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- Genre: Animes Movies, Drama
- Country: United States
- Director: Adam Elliot
- Cast: Eric Bana, Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Dominique Pinon, Magda Szubanski
