by Cain Noble-Davies
Worth: $18.00
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Jacki Weaver, Eric Bana, Magda Szubanski
Intro:
Elliot not only lives up to the artistic ethos of masters like Jan Švankmajer, but also the core ideal of dramatic tragedy: expressing pain not to persist within it, but to purge it from the self and move forward with renewal –laying new sparkly slime trails into the ground, rather than just retracing them.
It’s been a long 15 years for a new Adam Elliot feature to hit cinemas. Sure, he gave us Ernie Biscuit to snack on back in 2015, but with the substantial visual upgrade it displayed from Mary and Max (a true ‘essential viewing’ candidate if there ever was one), that only made the wait even more fidgety. As much as Laika and Aardman (and Phil Tippett’s magnum opus Mad God) have remained the vanguards of the stop-motion animation artform, there’s still no real replacement for Elliot’s particular niche of oppressively tragicomic storytelling. That he outright refused offers to work with those aforementioned studios to keep doing his own thing is quite the power move, especially when it means he can (eventually) invite audiences to witness art like Memoir of a Snail.
Right from the opening credits, not only is Elliot’s uncanny attention to detail still inescapable, but he maintains a similar increase in polish as that from M&M to EB. The adorable characters, the sight gag galore set design, the earthen colour palette; it’s still wholeheartedly his aesthetic, just with an evident and appreciated showing of growth right out the gate.
His wayward telling of the life story of Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook reminding everyone that she will always be one of this nation’s greatest acting talents) likewise sticks to what he does best. It’s funny, it’s heartbreaking, and it’s filled with so many perplexingly specific touches that it’s both impossible to think there isn’t a lot of first-hand observation being poured into this… and kind of terrifying to contemplate that actually being the case, given the extent of things going wrong both for Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee).
Even considering Elliot’s penchant for pulling tears out of the audience’s faces like a desperate firefighter, his latest still stands out as his darkest outing to date. The gut punch impact of the plot developments is as wince-inducing as ever, but there’s a distinctly angrier edge to it this time around, primarily through the inclusion of regional religious fundamentalism with Gilbert’s foster family. For someone who has shown unconditional empathy in the past (as seen with the imperfection speech from Mary and Max), him being this pointed can be somewhat uneasy viewing. Not that he doesn’t have reason to be, though, as it’s still consistent with the prevailing Queerness of his body of work, and it fits weirdly well next to Grace’s dissatisfaction with life turning into raw and burning resentment.
As wildly out-of-pocket as the humour can get (while being consistently gut-busting), and as much as it lays into the main characters, it’s also remarkably free of genuine malice. For contrast, Mad God was a dark treatise on how stop-motion, literally giving life to the inanimate, can reflect something wicked in the human heart depending on what is done with it; how giving life just to inflict pain on it is unforgivable, no matter what form that life takes.
Elliot, on the other hand, never lets tragedy sit without being addressed or balanced out. He puts his creations (and his audience) through the wringer, make no mistake, but that only makes the brighter moments feel that much more earned and honest. And as Grace lays it all out to one of her many pet snails, reflecting on all the different shells people trap each other in and even trap themselves in, the attention to literate and visual detail grounds even the most outlandish moments in a tangible sense of reality. Elliot not only lives up to the artistic ethos of masters like Jan Švankmajer, but also the core ideal of dramatic tragedy: expressing pain not to persist within it, but to purge it from the self and move forward with renewal –laying new sparkly slime trails into the ground, rather than just retracing them.
Memoir of a Snail is an Adam Elliot joint through and through, which is cause for celebration, quite frankly. Not every new direction it goes lands with the same assuredness as his past work, while simultaneously reusing quite a few of his best hits, but it’s a testament to his skill at the craft that his work remains as shockingly wholesome as ever. It’s absolutely been worth the wait. Just make sure to have at least one fresh box of tissues on hand; you will need it.