Memoir of a Snail is a new stop-motion animated dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness from the director of 2009’s Mary & Max: a stop-motion dramedy about cruelty, loneliness, and mental illness.  It’s also the best movie I saw at this year’s New Orleans Film Festival, where it was met with waves of warm laughter and audible wincing from a packed audience (whereas Mary & Max played to mostly empty theaters when it went into wide release 15 years ago).  I’m really into what Adam Elliot’s doing.  He’s got a tangible, darkly comic sense of despair to his work that’s matched only by fellow snail’s pace animator Don Hertzfeldt.  Thankfully, this time Elliot borrows a little Jean-Pierre Juenet whimsy to help cut the bitterness of that despair, but it’s not an entirely convincing affirmation about life’s silver linings. Even though he ends his morbid tale of lifelong sibling suffering on an unexpected happy note, he’s still the living personification of the “Do you think a depressed person make this?” gag from Parks & Rec.  Elliot makes sad little tableaus about lonely shut-ins for a sad little audience of lonely shut-ins . . . Then you see all the celebrity vocal performance credits in the concluding scroll (Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Magda Szubanksi, Nick Cave, etc.) and assume he’s gotta be doing somewhat alright.

Memoir of a Snail is a story told to a snail by an adult woman dressed as a snail.  Continuing the epistolary format of Mary & Max, Grace Pudel (Snook) recounts her entire life’s journey to her favorite pet mollusk (Sylvia, after Sylvia Plath), occasionally pausing to recite letters written by loved ones – namely, her estranged brother Gilbert (Smit-McPhee) and her geriatric bestie Pinky (Jacki Weaver).  All three are lonely souls who’ve had a real tough time of it, having lived lives defined by tragic isolation from family, depressive bouts of self-hatred, and cruel bullying from small-minded townies.  Grace has found joy only in those two remaining members of her family, and most of her life since being orphaned as a child has been a struggle to restore that family unit in a single location.  The struggle is mostly inward, but it’s externally marked by Grace’s obsessive collection of snail-themed clutter.  She lives alone and gradually turns her small-town home into a shrine to all things snails, carpeting the floors, walls, and shelves with snails & snaily tchotchkes, burying herself under the weight of a singular personal obsession instead of reaching out for genuine human contact.  She even costumes herself as a snail in her everyday dress, signaling to the world that she’d rather find safety in her own shell than be vulnerable to the worst of humanity.

Adam Elliot admits to the audience that he sees a part of himself in Grace Pudel by making her great ambition in life to become a stop-motion animator.  The gamble there is hoping the audience will see ourselves in Grace Pudel too, which is a pretty solid bet if you’re sitting inside watching stop-motion cartoons about loneliness at a film festival instead of enjoying the crisp Fall weather outside.  Elliot throws a lot of cruelty at us, including especially vicious sequences involving gay bashing and nonconsensual force-feeding fetishism.  If you’re the kind of shut-in sad sack who occasionally grumbles “Goddamn life!” to yourself at your lowest moments, though, there’s plenty humor to be found in Grace’s never-ending misfortunes, like when her adoptive parents find more joy in swinger culture than being around her or when her brothers’ adoptive religious-nut parents speak in tongues like cattle auctioneers during prayer.  There’s a kind of classic Tim Burton sentimentality to Memoir of a Snail that acknowledges how miserable life can be for social outsiders while celebrating those outsiders for their eccentricities.  Elliot is eager to illustrate monstrous, unforgivable human behavior at every turn, but he just as often underlines the survival need for human touch & companionship.  While Grace’s constant search for silver linings might read as sad & desperate, she does always find them.

-Brandon Ledet