By Jonathan Monovich.
It’s always tempting to speed up the process and save money by using CGI, but I think we’re at a period where we’re drowning in CGI. Now, with the advent of AI, I think stop motion has never been appreciated as much as it is now.”
—Adam Elliot
Chocolate hot dogs, cousins that smell like licorice, and aunts that drink ant poison are some of the many peculiarities of Adam Elliot’s inimitable filmography. Born and raised in Australia, Elliot’s films are all stop motion, yet they are more human than most live action films. Fascinated by the unconventional, Elliot’s animation repeatedly frequents dejected characters and their crestfallen lives. A philosopher in his own right, Elliot is attracted to life’s obstacles and how they are overcome. Though often described by dark, muted colors, there is always a light at the end of the tunnel in Elliot’s films. Physical ailments, mental health conditions, and misfortune plague Elliot’s protagonists, yet their resilience and recognition of life’s simple pleasures, help them to make the most of what life presents. Elliot’s earliest work, the short films Uncle (1996), Cousin (1999), and Brother (2000) grapple with appreciating family members for who they are despite their idiosyncrasies. This is a theme that flows throughout Elliot’s work. His Oscar-winning short, Harvie Krumpet (2003), showed the beginning of an increase in runtime and ambition for Elliot, branching into a story about taking life by the reigns, the importance of optimism, and truly living life to the fullest. His last short, Ernie Biscuit (2015), tells the story of a deaf Parisian taxidermist in pursuit of love and a new life in Venice. Of course, the protagonists face their setbacks along the way. There is a dark sense of humor at play in Elliot’s films, but there are also very expressive moments. Elliot’s feature film debut, Mary and Max (2009) is a genuine masterpiece of animation, chronicling the unlikely friendship between an Australian child, Mary (Bethany Whitmore/Toni Collette), and a middle-aged New York loner (Phillip Seymour Hoffman). The film’s emotional heft produces both tears of crying and laughter. This is the beauty of Elliot’s emotional rollercoasters. His second feature, Memoir of a Snail (2024) is a terrific follow-up, and exemplifies a thematic intermingling of his oeuvre thus far.
Memoir of a Snail begins in 1970s Melbourne, following the upbringing of twins Grace (Sarah Snook)/Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) Pudel. Grace faces more than her fair share of bullies; her cleft lip makes her a subject of teasing, but her brother Gilbert is a heroic figure. He saves her life during a medical operation and defends Grace at school. Obsessed with fire and rescuing animals, Gilbert is a wild man with a big heart. His goal in life is to be a street performer. Grace, on the other hand, is reserved, shy, and sweet. Her dream is to become a stop motion animator. They possess their own unique qualities, but they share an unbreakable bond symbolized by the joining of scars on their arms that form a smiley face. The kids’ career ambitions are reflective of their father, Percy’s (Dominiqu Pinon) past, having dabbled in street performing and stop motion animation before being debilitated by a drunk driver in Paris. Percy, despite now being a paraplegic and alcoholic, is everything to Grace and Gilbert. When his health takes a turn for the worst, Grace and Gilbert are put up for adoption. Their separation, after being sent to two different families, brings about the main conflict in Memoir of a Snail. Grace recalls that Percy compared childhood to being drunk, saying “everyone remembers what you did except you.” Grace is an anomaly as she remembers everything from her childhood, allowing for her to recall and tell her life story to her pet snail, Sylvia, over the course of the film. She is an anomaly in many ways as is her brother. It is their differences that make them stand out, particularly after they are foisted to their unchosen households. Like Mary and Max’s protagonists, Grace and Gilbert become pen pals. Along the way, Grace befriends an adventurous old woman named Pinky (Jackie Weaver). Her presence is immensely influential, helping foster a Harold and Maude (1971) style relationship. Gilbert doesn’t have a Pinky in his life, making his situation significantly darker. Through the years, we see Grace and Gilbert grow older in this bildungsroman. Their problems only seem to increase over time, yet by the film’s finale, Memoir of a Snail proves that life’s unpleasantries eventually are counterbalanced. Memoir of a Snail is a stressful watch at times for its increasingly depressing subject matter, but it is one that is well worth enduring for the delight it simultaneously produces. There are few who can pull off a film like Memoir of a Snail, though Elliot is also an anomaly, having achieved a brilliant allegory for life.
I had the pleasure of speaking with Adam Elliot for the 60th Chicago International Film Festival—North America’s longest running film festival. Below is our conversation.
Snails are recurring in your work. Apart from Memoir of a Snail, we see them in one of your earliest short films, Uncle, when the dog, Reg, gets hit by a skateboard and with the pet lizard, Beef, in Brother. Max also has pet snails named after scientists in Mary and Max. Can you talk a little bit about your connection to snails?
It’s a bit serendipitous. I connected with one of my co-students from film school the other day, and she came across some of our student exercises from 1996. I thought they’d been lost since we shot on film back then. The first thing I ever actually animated in stop motion was a snail. We were put into groups, and we were told we had to make a TV commercial for Joe’s snail pellets (snail poison) [laughs]. We found the footage, we’re working on digitizing it, and the distributors are going to put it on the Memoir of a Snail DVD. There’s that, but there are actually a couple reasons that I went back to snails. The first draft of the script was titled “Memoir of a Lady Bird.” Then, the film Lady Bird (2017) came out, and I said it can’t be “Lady Bird” anymore. Lady birds are a bit cute as well. I don’t like things that are too cute. I usually tend to kill them like Reg the dog in Uncle. Anything that gets too cute, I quickly destroy it. It just didn’t feel like the right kind of creature for Grace. I was looking for something that was more symbolic and metaphorical in terms of Grace’s mental state. When you touch a snail’s antennas, they retract into their shell, and that’s what Grace does her whole life. She retracting from the world, going into the protection of her shell, and using it as a shield. There’s also the spiral on a snail’s shell that is a lovely little symbol of life going in a circle. I think the last reason is the quote “life can only be understood backwards, but we have to live it forwards,” which is by the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard. I actually used that quote in my first film Uncle as well. Snails can’t reverse. They can move in circles, but they can’t go backwards, so I liked that as well. There are a lot of little lovely connections. Some are more obvious, and some are more nuanced, but it just had to be snails [laughs].
That’s fascinating! I love all these different reasons. It’s my understanding that your father was once an acrobatic clown. This is also the case in your short film Brother. In Memoir of a Snail, Grace and Gilbert’s father was a street performer and a stop motion animator. Both children have a desire to do pursue one of their father’s careers. I’m interested to hear if street performing was also an interest of yours before ultimately deciding to pursue animation. Also, did your father play a role in your love of animation, or how did that passion come about?
For sure! Dad was an acrobatic clown and a vaudevillian. My brother is an actor. I suppose there’s showoffs in my family [laughs]. We’ve all had various careers. Before I went to film school, I had a stall at a craft market. Every Sunday, I’d set up a little table and sell hand painted t-shirts in little pizza boxes. I’d cut a hole out in the lids and sell these t-shirts, so I was a street vendor. I’ve always been fascinated by street vendors. I have a lot of friends who are street vendors, stallholders, or “stallies” as we call them in Australia. I’m used to that kind of career or lack of career. You usually become a “stallie” because you don’t have a career. I’ve always been attracted to eccentricity and people who’ve chosen a career path that is perceived as being strange or unusual. I have a lot of eccentric friends, and I’m certainly attracted to the eccentric I’d say.
In Harvie Krumpet when Harvie becomes aware of the phrase “carpe diem,” it becomes a credo for him, drastically changing his outlook on life. In Memoir of a Snail that mentality lives on through Pinky and her adventurous lifestyle. Your films are deeply emotional for their weight in exploring life’s struggles, yet your characters always find a way to keep on trucking along. There are so many great analogies in your films like comparing life to a sidewalk or a cigarette, and there are so many memorable quotes in general. I’m interested to hear what would you say is your personal philosophy for coping in real life, and is it similar to the views of your characters?
Absolutely, it’s very similar! I’ve always been interested in the meaning of life in a broader sense. I’ve always turned to self-help books as a way of trying to work things out in life, but of course, most self-help books don’t really give much insight into why we all exist [laughs]. I’m certainly an existentialist. I collect quotes that are about the struggles of life and how to cope, and I have very detailed notebooks with all sorts of quotes that I’ve overheard. I know Woody Allen was always fascinated with death as well, and I think that kind of ties in with it all in asking ‘how do we work all of this out before we die’ and ‘how do we find meaning amongst it all’. I love the quote “how do we find meaning in a world that’s meaningless.” All people go through phases of having an existential crisis, but I’m probably more fascinated than the average person [laughs].
Given your Australian background, I’ve noticed that you frequently collaborate with Australian actors for your films like Sarah Snook, Toni Collete, Eric Bana, and many others. Being a fan of his music and having just recently listened to the Faith, Hope, and Carnage audiobook, I immediately recognized Nick Cave’s voice as Bill (one of Pinky’s several husbands). I know that you poke fun at self-help books in Memoir of a Snail, but I find this to be a poignant one. Have you read it? I think it relates to your films in some ways.
I haven’t had a chance to read it yet, but Nick Cave is of course a philosopher and self-help guru with the advice that he gives through his newsletters. Cave is also a deep thinker, and I love having one-on-one conversations with deep thinkers. For example, I have a meeting with a friend of mine once a week. It’s exactly the same every week. At two o’clock, we have two cups of tea and propose two questions to each other about life over two hours. During the week, I’ll text him an existential question that he has to think about and come up with an answer for our discussion. One weekend it was ‘what is the definition of beauty?’ I find going to parties with groups of people to be boring, and I’m much more interested in one-on-one conversations. I’m interested in conversations about everything really, but like I said, I’m especially interested in questions like ‘why are we here,’ and ‘why do we exist?’
I love that! That’s an amazing routine. Your films touch on serious subjects and these existential questions, but at the same time, your films also find a way to embrace humor and laugh at the absurdity of life in a way. Can you please talk about how you approach that balance?
Balance really is the word. It’s so tricky to get that balance between comedy and tragedy, humor and pathos, and light and dark. I always struggle with it because I tend to go too dark. I usually need to balance it out with more comedy [laughs]. I’m always trying to write more and more jokes to equalize the darkness, but I love that quote ‘without the dark, the light has no meaning.’ I’ve always felt you really have to be cruel to your protagonists and make them suffer. I probably do that more than other writers, but I try to reward the protagonists at the end. Grace has to become a whole person before the reward in Memoir of Snail. I didn’t want to make it where Grace needs a man in her life or her twin to make her whole. She has to become a whole person on her own. Even though Pinky has a dark background, I brought her in mostly for comic relief. I think the film would be really gloomy without Pinky. She lightens the mood a lot.
Everything is getting so mechanized and robots will be doing more and more things in the future, so I think the pendulum is swinging back towards things that are handcrafted at the moment.”
As you had mentioned, it’s also said in your short film, Uncle, that “life can only be understood backwards, but we live it forwards.” This is of course very applicable to Memoir of a Snail as the film is largely built around Grace recalling her life/retelling it to her pet snail, Sylvia. Through examining her past, I think it helps Grace to rethink Pinky’s advice that “life isn’t about looking backwards, it’s about moving forwards.” In terms of narrative, it also allows for you to rely on narration, which is prevalent in all of your work. Can you speak on the importance of narration as a plot device in your work?
With Uncle being my first film, I had no confidence as an animator. I was really just making it up as I went along. As I went on, I realized that having voiceover/narration was a great device. It helps fill in the gaps and drive the story without having to do much animation. I’m not a very good animator, and I actually don’t even like animating anymore. This is why I’ve retired from animating [laughs]. Originally, narration became a necessity, and I had to use narration because my budgets were so low. That’s still the case today. The budget for Memoir of a Snail was only $4 million. You see, Grace is here with me [holds up figurine]. She has no legs, so we couldn’t afford to do proper walking. She walks like this [imitates Grace walking]. Lip synch is also very slow and expensive, so I’ve had to rely on narration. I’m very conscious that too much narration can at times be overbearing, annoying, and problematic, so we do whatever we can to show and not say it. My editor, Bill, and I spent a lot of time removing as much dialogue as we could, so what remains is the bare essentials. It’s a process of distillation to pare back the dialogue. I love narration, but it’s challenging to get it right and make sure it’s not overbearing.
One of the many aspects of your films that I appreciate is the references you make. For example, a child wears a “Save Ferris” t-shirt at the bus stop, and Mary’s neighbor’s dogs are named Sonny and Cher in Mary and Max. I also really like the inclusion of “A Swingin’ Safari” at the end of Mary and Max; it’s such a fun song. In Memoir of a Snail, you call out a lot of authors like Slyvia Plath, Francis Kafka, and John Steinbeck as Grace and Gilbert are seen reading around the house a lot before they’re eventually separated. Speaking of Gilbert, I love the descriptor of him that he’s “Holden Caulfield, James Dean, and Charlie Brown all in one.” Many young men tend to connect with Catcher in the Rye, Rebel Without a Cause (1955), and Charlie Brown. Were those works all influential to you while you were growing up in Melbourne?
For sure! In particular, young men are drawn to these sorts of characters who are deep, dark, mysterious, and melancholic. When I was fleshing out Gilbert’s character, I thought ‘who is he like’ and started to jot down those names. I figured I’ll just say them to help communicate what I’m thinking. Gilbert’s also repressed. There’s the theme of cages in the film. There’s a lot of tie-ins, and the books are all ones that I was sort of forced to read as a teenager. They’re books that I come back to now. A lot of them are classics, and I’m always interested in reading the classics to see how a classic becomes a classic and understanding what is it about a story like The Grapes of Wrath that makes it timeless. It made sense to me to that Gilbert and Grace read books as a way of coping with their struggles in life. Even though their father, Percy, couldn’t offer them much in life with money, he did offer them the joy of reading and encouraged them to read. Even though they’re poverty stricken, I wanted to make it a very safe, secure, and rich childhood that they loved and cherished.
I like a lot of those books myself, so that resonated with me. I grew up watching stop motion as a child with films like Wallace and Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit (2005), James and the Giant Peach (1996), and the Rankin Christmas films like The Year Without a Santa Claus (1974) and Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town (1970), so I have a fond appreciation for the art form. When I got older, I realized that stop motion was also used for more mature films like Anomalisa (2015), Mad God (2021), and of course your work. You explore adult subject matter, but also maintain a childlike innocence in your films. To me, the font you use in the opening credits resembles the Rankin films in a way. Can you speak about this, and was this a conscious decision of yours?
I can certainly see the link, but it wasn’t a conscious decision. Ever since Uncle, I’ve always resisted font. I’m a very indecisive person and could never decide which font I liked, so I just went with my own handwriting. For my first three films, Uncle, Cousin, and Brother, I used liquid paper on black cardboard and I loved that handmade look. I stuck with that handwriting because it fed into the idea that everything you’re looking at with my films is handmade. I never let go of that. With Mary and Max and Memoir of a Snail I couldn’t handwrite the entire credits because that would’ve taken too long, so I had to go with a font. I love Georgia font and have stuck with it. It used to be typewriter font, but now its Georgia. I love handwriting letters. A lot of us don’t write much anymore. As a child, I used to love practicing my handwriting. My handwriting is chunky, wunky, and wobbly, and it has a childlike quality or a naivety to it [laughs]. My films are deceptive. On the surface, they look childlike and bit like Wallace and Gromit. We’ve all been brainwashed into thinking that animation is a genre and its not. Animation is a medium and there’s a long history of adult-oriented animation in Europe with places like the Czech Republic and Estonia. Things are changing, which is great. People recognize that stop motion can deal with challenging subject matter and darkness. Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro are some good examples of filmmakers showing that you can make adult content with stop motion.
I think it’s great that stop motion is being used like this more now. Memoir of a Snail opens with Pinky on her deathbed crying out ‘potatoes,’ and we eventually learn the significance. I imagine this had to be a Citizen Kane (1941) rosebud reference. Is that right, and was that that film one you were thinking of while making Memoir of a Snail?
You’re only the second person who has spotted that, and I’ve done hundreds of interviews for this film [laughs]. No one picks that up, but you’re spot on. That’s just me trying to be pretentious. I was trying to think of a word that was absurd and the complete opposite of a rosebud, so I went with a potato since it’s ugly and gnarly. Then I had to think about how I could work potatoes into the story. I’m sure I rewatched Citizen Kane when I was writing this and that’s why I must have decided to stick a moment like that in there. I started writing eight years ago. It’s so long ago that I have trouble remembering exactly when these ideas were formulated.
Stop motion is an incredibly difficult art form that requires tireless dedication. What you have achieved is truly amazing and I applaud you for helping keep animation alive when we’re facing the advent of artificial intelligence. Seeing something like the smiley face scar created between Grace and Gilbert is very touching and human. It’s my understanding that you create everything by hand for your films. Can you please speak a little bit about your production/development process and the amount of time and care a film like Memoir of a Snail takes?
For all the films I’ve made in roughly the last thirty years I’ve stuck to the in camera principle that every prop, set, and character would be handmade. I also stuck to there being no CGI or effects. For example, fire is made with yellow cellophane and cigarette smoke is made with cotton balls. They’re all real, tangible, and tactile things that you can hold in your hand. It’s always tempting to speed up the process and save money by using CGI, but I think we’re at a period where we’re drowning in CGI. Now, with the advent of AI, I think stop motion has never been appreciated as much as it is now. It’s obvious what we’re doing is handcrafted. Those fingerprints on the clay remind the audience this is real. Of course, AI will be able to replicate that, but there’s an appreciation in society for all things that are handcrafted like handknitted jumpers and handmade bread. Everything is getting so mechanized and robots will be doing more and more things in the future, so I think the pendulum is swinging back towards things that are handcrafted at the moment. This is why we put the sentence at the end of the film, saying “this film was made by human beings.” It’s a reminder to the audience that what they’re watching is handmade. It wasn’t really meant to be a comment on AI, but I can totally understand it being interpreted that way. AI is certainly a worry, but I’m more worried about AI as a writer than a stop motion animator. Who knows what’s down the track.
Memoir of a Snail is now exclusively in theaters via IFC Films.
Jonathan Monovich is a Chicago-based writer and a regular contributor for Film International. His writing has also been featured in Film Matters, Bright Lights Film Journal, and PopMatters.