Animated Gem ‘Memoir of a Snail’ Proves the Medium Is for Every Kind of Story
Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot, who is showing his second stop-motion animation feature aimed at adults, “Memoir of a Snail” at Telluride, hasn’t been diagnosed with OCD, “but I am probably at the very tip of it,” he told IndieWire on Zoom. “I love the number nine.” Thirty years ago, when he was at film school, he thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice to make a trilogy of trilogies? I’ve always loved a triptych of paintings, the number three? And I thought, ‘I’ll do three short shorts, three long shorts, and three features.’ I never thought it would happen. But I’m getting close.”
So far, he has completed seven of the nine films, with two left, including one feature. Elliot, like Guillermo del Toro, is proving that animated films do not have to only be aimed at children. Many of his films deal with outsiders, often with some sort of affliction. “When I first started, it was never a conscious or deliberate strategy,” he said. “I just tended to make films about people around me who I knew, family and friends. I’ve always been interested in mental illness and obscure or rare afflictions. What links all my films now is that these are people who are perceived as different or imperfect, and in many ways they are the opposite. People who are marginalized, misunderstood, they’re the people I’m fascinated by, and want to tell stories about. I’m not interested in fantasy or talking animals. I strive to create very real and believable and authentic characters, and I base nearly all of them on people I know.”
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Lonely Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) narrates her memoir in the form of a letter to her favorite snail, Sylvia. Grace collects snails, among many other things. In fact, Grace is a bit of a hoarder, and tells us how she got there, from her childhood through a disastrous marriage. She was attached to her wheelchair-bound single alcoholic father (Dominique Pinon) and twin brother (Kodi Smit-McPhee), but when the father suddenly keels over, she and her brother are shipped to separate foster homes on opposite sides of the country. An eccentric older woman named Pinky (Jackie Weaver) befriends Grace and makes her as happy as she can be until she is reunited with her twin. “Losing a twin is like losing an eye,” says Grace in the film.
Elliot’s mother had a bit of the hoarding tendencies evinced by his lead character, who grew up with a cleft palate. “She’s an extreme collector,” Elliot said. “I’ve always been fascinated: when does a collection become a hoard? And usually it’s to do with shame. And my mother’s certainly not at that level yet. She just can’t throw things away. She collects plastic bags, and she has seven wooden spoons. Her cupboards are jam-packed.”
Elliot spoke to psychologists and read books on the psychology of hoarding. “It has a lot to do with trauma as well, and severe, extreme hoarders have tended to have had a loss of a child or a sibling or a partner in a traumatic fashion, and the collecting is a way of coping,” he said. “So every item they keep has a sentimental value, and they just can’t bear to throw it away because it has meaning. Having lost both her parents at a young age and the loss of her twin is the most traumatic. I like to drag my characters through the mud. I like my protagonist to have either a lot of misfortune or bad luck. How do they cope with that?”
Luckily, in the end, Elliot rewards Grace for all the torture he puts her through. “Who hasn’t felt lonely, who hasn’t felt different and misunderstood?,” said Elliot. “I’d like to meet Grace. My characters, even though they’re clay, they become very real and and I respect and cherish them.”
Pinky is a colorful older character, an ex-exotic dancer who dresses in a flashy way and hoovers up life. Elliot was partly inspired by “Harold and Maude.” “I’ve always been interested in people as they age,” he said. “They become less inhibited and they have more free will and free spirit.” When Snook watched the film for the first time on opening night at the Melbourne Film Festival, she told Elliot she wished she had played that character. “Pinky’s the sort of person we all aspire to be as we age.”
Elliot has a following mainly in Australia and Europe. “They have a long history of dark animated cinema,” he said. “It can be adult. Whereas in America, they struggle a bit more, particularly in the mainstream. I get emails all the time saying, ‘your films aren’t for children.’ I’m labeled as an arthouse filmmaker, an independent. I am catering to a much smaller demographic: it’s quite broad in terms of age. So I have a lot of young people emailing me at the moment, male and female who relate to Grace as well as older people.”
The filmmaker starts with the script first, and spends years on each screenplay, with many drafts. “I know vaguely what the characters are going to look like,” he said. “So once I’ve locked off the script, then I go into design, and I start drawing the characters, and then I’ll start playing with the clay and and then I hand that all over to the art department, and they begin making the thousands of items that need to be made.” During Australia’s endless lockdown, Elliot drew the storyboards and got started on the production design, ending up with some 6,000 drawings.
When casting he always had Snook in mind, one of several Melbourne actors in the ensemble. “I thought of other Australian actors, Cate Blanchett and Nicole Kidman, but they just didn’t seem to have that vulnerability and quietness that Sarah’s voice has,” he said. “You can have a wonderful performance from an actor and wonderful animation, and you marry the two together, and they just don’t work. There’s no rhyme or reason why that happens, and it happens all the time. So we were incredibly nervous that her voice wouldn’t marry, but I spend a lot of sessions with her in the studio, and we talked a lot about keeping keeping her voice quiet without it becoming a dull monotone, and knowing where to put in a bit of bit of color and a bit light and shade and and humor. It was a lot of work. Grace can be very boring because she is in her room with her books and her ornaments and not much happens until [romantic interest] Ken comes along.”
The $4.7 million film’s costly opening sequence, where the camera pans over a chaotic pile of the props you eventually discover in the film, was inspired by the Xanadu warehouse in “Citizen Kane” as well as the films of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. It took weeks to set up and shoot. “We wanted to say to the audience from the get-go,” said Elliot, “this is a bit more sophisticated, and you’re in for a challenging hour and a half.”
The filmmakers create maquettes for each character, at different ages. The leads often have as many as a dozen. They’re not cheap, they can run as high as $20,000 each to construct. “They’re like, Mr. Potato Head,” said Elliot, “you can pull their heads off and swap their arms and put on different mouths. Pinky alone had over 100 different mouth shapes that we’d have to plug on and off. They had all these skeletons and armatures inside them, and we have to make little tiny blinks, and the little pupils on the eyeballs are magnetic. They’re intricate little machines.”
In their studio, Elliot had seven animators working non-stop for 32 weeks, and full camera and art departments. At capacity, the studio had over 50 crew. “The beauty of all animation is your characters can look however you want them to look,” said Elliot. “We will create any world we want. All independent filmmakers cherish that control.”
Elliot is the only filmmaker to win Annecy twice in the feature category. Eliot might be due for a return to Oscar contention after winning for his short “Harvie Krumpet” 21 years ago. So he knows he’s in for six months of promotion. “In my downtime, stuck in airport lounges,” he said, “I’ll be trying to write the beginnings of the next one.”
”Memoir of a Snail” next screens at the 2024 Telluride Film Festival and the 2024 Toronto International Film Festival. IFC Films will release it later this year.
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