(IMAGE: IFC Films)
IFC Films. 2024. Animated. 94 minutes.
RATING: 3 out of 4
The belated introduction of an Academy Award for Best Animated feature in 2002 has borne some strange and delicious fruit over the last quarter century. Great and daring animated movies too numerous to name — many of which would never have seen American distribution — have garnered attention, funding and even some decent US box office, all because there’s an attention-getting marketing hook available in that Oscar nom.
A few personal favorites show how eclectic animation has become: Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Parronaud’s memory of Iranian things past Persepolis (2007). The raucous and sensual bolero come to life Chico and Rita (2011). Isao Takahata’s last and perhaps greatest anime, the feudal epic The Tale of the Princess Kayuga (2014). And of course Marcel the Shell With Shoes On (2022), an existential fable as charming and potent as Le Petite Prince. And those are just the films that grabbed a nomination — look at the GKIDS back catalogue and you’ll see great stuff the Academy considered and rejected like Jean-Froancois Laguionie’s Le Tableau and Makoto Shinkai’s Weathering With You, all waiting to be uncovered.
Into the arena for this year’s awards season strides Memoir of a Snail, Adam Elliot’s moving, deeply personal and utterly unique stop-motion animated fable. Grace Pudel (voice of Sarah Snook) is a long suffering sufferer. Her mom died giving birth to her. Her dad was a paraplegic magician, struck down as he performed in the street. Her twin brother Gilbert gets torn away from her after dad finally succeeds in drinking himself to death, and Gilbert is sent on a horrific adventure of his own, living inside a Christian cult. In a world without love and connection, Grace gravitates toward a legion of pet snails — creatures trapped in shells of their own devising, a predicament Grace relates to.
Although Elliot shares Tim Burton’s fascination with dark things, Memoir of a Snail is far closer to the bleak existential punchline comedy of Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day than it could ever be to something as arch and fabricated as Nightmare Before Christmas. Grace’s traumas are real, relatable and life-sized — grief, depression, loneliness, and an ongoing ache from a sense the world isn’t watching, and nobody truly cares. Humor abounds in Memoir of a Snail, but it’s often perverse, frequently very adult, and more than usually offered up as a kind of laughter in the graveyard. Grace’s heroism isn’t about saving Christmas or rescuing Coraline’s parents. It comes from having an unendurable life, that, against all odds, she somehow endures.
The quiet passion of this film shows in the eight years it took Elliot to create it, and in the hand-crafted care manifested in every aspect of the universe Grace and her cohorts both embody and inhabit. It’s rare to see a film so personal that achieves and sustains such universal emotion, but everybody has experienced rejection and misfortune, and so everybody willing to see past the children’s-film-gone-awol surfaces will be able to relate. Bad things will happen, Elliot tells us, and the real measure of our success in life’s journey may well be about whether we handle those challenges with, ahem, Grace.
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