Memoir of a Snail Review – Excellent Animated Heartfelt Journey of Love, Life, Friendship, Hope

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Category: Indies, Docs, Foreign Film

Published on Wednesday, 23 October 2024 18:57

Written by Janet Walker

Memoir of a Snail, from Sony Pictures Classics, brings to the screen an emotional and heartfelt tale as two siblings, separated by circumstance, confront the harsh realities of life in this charming, and hilarious journey.

Our journey into Grace Pudel, voiced by Sarah Snook, life begins as she is sitting on a bench mourning the loss of her one true friend, Pinky, voiced by Jacki Weaver. As she is talking to herself, she begins to talk about her childhood, which is when we meet, Gilbert, Grace's twin brother, voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee.

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Grace was a premature baby, born with a cleft palette. Once Gilbert was born, the pair were inseparable. We see them on their journey into childhood and Gilbert became her protector. As a family they loved to read, and we see a father who reads with his children and introduces them to the arts.

Grace and Gilbert's mom died, and an accident left their father in a paraplegic. He would tell them his stories of working as a street performer in Paris, and locking eyes with their mother, an Australian, and it was love at first sight. While he was performing his street art in Australia, a drunk driver mowed him down and he was left, forever, in a wheelchair. One day, they took him to the amusement park and rode the roller coaster. He told them when he dies, he wants his ashes released here. He told them he felt like he was alive, and flying. He died that night.

Now as Grace and Gilbert are still children, they began wards of the court and were separated and moved to two different foster homes. Grace went to live in Canberra, and Gilbert on the other side of the country, and the two were separated by a vast desert.

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While they wrote often, Gilbert became enslaved by a family who preached hell, fire, and damnation, who took children in to work on the orchard. Grace, as she writes, received the better deal, as she had two loving new parents who wanted her to excel, and each week she received a new best certificate. They were, as she explains, swingers which meant something entirely different that she thought and soon they found a nudist colony that fit them.

As she began working at the library she met Pinky, the town excentric. Pinky had lived. Lived more lives than any of the locals, she traveled, embraced the strange, unusual, full of grit and a lust for life, and had room enough in her eccentric home, for one more slightly strange, but genuinely kind, new soul. This begins the story of Grace and Pinky.

We understand Pinky becomes the mother, and best friend, that Grace never had. As fortune for a tiny moment smiled on Grace, she felt she had come into her own. We see her desperation to keep one small part of her past life alive, begin to squeeze out the future. Her love for snails, and their tough shell that covered them in hardship, and been her mother's favorite, and her brother's, and now they were both gone. It was her responsibility to keep her family alive, and to do that she needed the snails.

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This ushers in the final poignant, and deeply heartfelt, act.

Memoir of a Snail is an emotional, heartfelt, hilarious chronicle of life.

The animation is extraordinary. Director Adam Eliot, who also wrote the story, has created an amazing, intricate world to tell his sensitive story of triumph over circumstances and tragedy. The cast of voice actors, Sarah Snook, Jacki Weaver, Kodi Smit-McPhee, and Eric Bana, bring these odd, and yet, warm and loving characters to life.  

Expressive, sensitive and touching, Memoir of a Snail, an adult animation film, opens in select markets October 25, 2024. See it.

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Country: Australia.

Language: English.

Runtime: 94 minutes.

Director: Adam Elliot.

Producer: Adam Elliot, Liz Kearney.

Writer: Adam Elliot.

Cast: Sara Snook, Eric Bana, Jacki Weaver, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Adam Elliot, Dominique Pinon, Nick Cave, Magda Szubanski, Flynn Wandin, Luke Elliot, Tony Armstrong, Saxon Wright, Klaus Banadinovich, Mason Litsos, Paul Capsis, David Williams, Dan Doherty, Grace Elliot, Charlotte Belsey.