Adam Elliot on MEMOIR OF A SNAIL and Stop Motion Animation – Pam Grady interviews

Adam Elliot, whose latest animation, Memoir of a Snail, is currently in theaters, can’t imagine spending his days attached to a computer. That distaste for a life spent perpetually engaged with technology altered the course of his life when he became interested in animation while in film school in his native Australia. Instead of pursuing computer graphics like so many of his classmates, he forged his own path with stop-motion animation, joining a select group that embraces the retro form that includes Tim Burton, Henry Sellick, Guillermo Del Toro, and the folks at England’s Aardman Animation and Oregon’s LAIKA Studios.

“I stumbled into stop-motion,” Elliot says in conversation, two days after being honored by the Mill Valley Film Festival with its first-ever spotlight program dedicated to an animator.
“My father owned a hardware store, and a lecturer suggested I try stop-motion. ‘You can get free timber and glue and paint.’ It made sense. So, that’s why my first film student film was a stop-motion film, but I never imagined it was going to become my career, and this is what I’d be doing 30 years later.”

Grace Pudel (Sarah Snook) is the focus of Memoir of a Snail. She and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) lose their mother in childbirth and when their father dies, they are separated. Shy Grace is farmed out to urban swingers, while gay Gilbert is sent to a family of religious fundamentalists in the Outback.

Gilbert, at least, has something to fight against and an outlet in his habit of setting fires. But while Grace finds a friend in vivacious senior citizen Pinky (Jacki Weaver), she mostly copes with her lifetime of trauma by turning inward and becoming a hoarder, the snails she collects—both living and in endless figurines—and their shells are an outward manifestation of her closed-off nature.
“I’m very cruel to my protagonists, and I certainly love extremes,” Elliot admits. “All the research I did into extreme hoarders is that the hoarding is a coping mechanism because of the trauma they’ve been through, more often than not brought on by the loss of a child or a sibling or twin. I drag Grace through the mud, and I’m very cruel to her. She suffers but she is a survivor. She endures. It’s not a big transformational arc but she becomes more proactive. I wanted Grace to get her life back together, move forward, find some happiness, get a career.”

Elliot holds Grace as he talks. He travels with her and Gilbert, but Gilbert is out of commission with an arm that’s become detached from his body. It is not his idea to travel with them, his distributor, IFC, suggested he bring companions. A smart move on the company’s part, as even as an inanimate object, she appears somehow alive, reflecting the passion Elliot put into the project.
The 52-year-old filmmaker first came to the public’s attention in 2003 with Harvie Krumpet, a short about a Polish immigrant in Australia who suffers from Tourette’s Syndrome and other issues. The film went on to win an Oscar and was followed by his first feature, 2009’s Mary and Max, about a pen pal friendship struck up between a lonely 8-year-old girl in Melbourne and an obese and autistic middle-aged New Yorker.

“When I started making films, I certainly felt very alone and had only just come out and I felt misunderstood. I hadn’t found my place in the world yet,” Elliot says. “It made sense, looking back, that my first film was about a lonely old man…I never would have thought that would become my trademark, that 30 years later, I’d still be making films about people who have something that marks them as being different or the other.

“But I’m so glad I kept pursuing these types of archetypes and characters, because I still go through periods of feeling misunderstood, even in the film industry, particularly in Australia. What I do is perceived as unusual, strange, and so I still feel like that odd person in the corner, but I’m less worried about it these days.”

The writer/director’s work is also distinctly adult in nature. He does not make films for small children or even teens. The situations and plot lines are adult. For all that, Elliot still sees the childlike reflected in his films, and, indeed, in all stop-motion animation.

“We all, at times, played with something tangible and tactile, whether it was finger painting or Play-Doh or plasticine or toy blocks,” he says. “Watching stop-motion, I think, takes us all back, even if we’re not conscious of it. It takes us back to our childhoods, and that’s a wonderful thing, because it’s primeval and it takes us back to a point in our lives where there was joy. And I think that’s what stop-motion has over CGI. CGI can’t really take us to those magical places in our minds. And I think that’s why stop-motion has survived.”

Elliot’s work is exacting, as evidenced by the work involved in filling Grace’s living space with snail ornaments covering the walls and every surface. The production required so many that it was too much for the art department to complete the task on its own. Elliot recruited his entire crew to make snail gewgaws. He estimates the production made between five and 7,000 pieces that then had to be glued into place.

“It was a massive effort by everybody to make all this stuff,” he says.

The effort pays off in the palpable world Elliot creates for Grace, one filled with her collection and her animals (she also hoards guinea pigs that love to breed more guinea pigs), the warmth of her friendship with Pinky and her longing for her missing brother. Memoir of a Snail is an extraordinary portrait of an ordinary woman.

“I’ve never been interested in heroic characters, although my characters are certainly brave and courageous,” Elliot says. “They’re antiheroes, I suppose. I just like telling stories about everyday people, and I’m lucky that I don’t have to look far, and that the people around me are very eccentric and interesting people – from my perspective, anyway.”