Coming out of her shell: "Memoir of a Snail"

If only as an indicator of the Academy's collective mental health at the start of 2025, consider this year's Best Animated Feature category. Three of the five nominated titles are digimations, one broadly optimistic about humanity's ability to survive crisis and change (the Disney-released Inside Out 2, inevitably), two flatly despairing (The Wild Robot, Flow). The other two contenders showcase stopmotion, though even here a choice presents. On the cheery front, there is, of course, Aardman's Wallace & Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. And then there's Memoir of a Snail, which follows in the depressively droll (or drolly depressive) lineage of Australian writer-director Adam Elliot's previous Harvie Krumpet, an Oscar winner for Best Animated Short in 2004, and Mary and Max. Where Nick Park folds his plasticine into the shape of eccentric Northern boffins who may or may not resemble a roundabout self-portrait, Elliot has an enduring fondness for marginalised figures poked, prodded and occasionally flattened by life, which makes claymation the ideal medium for him to be working in: it allows us to more tangibly feel, sometimes even see, the fickle fingers of fate digging into his characters, and the cracks of despair, sorrow and grief opening up in their wake. Elliot's new movie, which not untypically commences with a withered crone's dying breath, forms an extended study of one Grace Pudel (pronounced Puddle, possibly after Hyacinth Bucket), a snail-obsessed misfit with a hairlip whose mother died during childhood and whose father passed soon after. We find Grace (voiced by Sarah Snook) in her late friend's vegetable garden, narrating the story of her rough childhood licking batteries and suchlike with delinquent twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee), a creation who resembles Bart Simpson redrawn by The Cure's Robert Smith. Grace's onscreen audience is her favourite snail Sylvia, named after Ms. Plath. All that should give you some idea of the issues in play here, and also the prevailing outlook. I'm not saying that Elliot has a gloomy disposition, but when Gilbert declares early on (of the snail-shaped ring gifted to him by his sis) "I'm going to wear this until the day I die", you do worry how much longer the tyke can be for this world.

The salvation of Elliot's films has always been that they're so comfortable, even relaxed around our damnation that they become mordantly funny. I'd lay good money that one formative influence on this career was Tim Burton, though Elliot strides even further into the mire than Burton has publicly. One of young Gracie's pals is a homeless man sacked from his previous position of magistrate after admitting to compulsively masturbating during trials. Grace's father, a sometime street performer in Paris, is reduced to working the rough-edged Melbourne suburb of Brunswick; one gig there is preceded by a very Australian heckle of "wanker!", and dad is subsequently run over by a truck. If you don't subscribe to the "life's hard, and then you die" worldview, this could well seem gruelling, a series of episodic variations on the same grim theme. (Such is life, the pessimists say.) There are points in the second half where you sense the misery clotting, resulting in a film that feels some way longer and denser than its stated 94 minutes. The consolation, which is considerable, is that Elliot's modelling has become only more ambitious, which in turn allows fresh air and sunshine to penetrate the overall cloud cover. The animator's earlier projects unfurled around cramped sets, tactically underlit to conceal any budgetary constraints, but here he really is extending himself, building worlds: funfairs, Paris, The Two Ronnies on the telly, various unsuitable foster homes (not least a swingers' hub and a cult complex), a self-assembled crazy golf course, and a setpiece with John Denver and a helicopter ("Take me home, country roads!") which does much in itself to explain the kid-unfriendly rating. Most cheeringly, he's broadened his palette without any attendant loss of character or detail. Note how Grace's mumpy Jack Skellington face illuminates when presented with an engagement ring attached to a chipolata, and the casting of Nick Cave as a horny postman; you can't fail to miss the minor miracle of the final movement, which is all the more moving for arriving at such hard-won happiness. As with life, sometimes you need to push on through: this is one of those endings that redeems a few earlier wobbles, and Elliot tops it with a seven-word statement of ChatGPT-era defiance tucked away at the very end of his closing credits: "This film was made by human beings." I mean it as a compliment when I say that it feels like it.

Memoir of a Snail is now playing in selected cinemas.