Review: Get under its shell and you’ll be charmed by ‘Memoir of a Snail’ and its unique loner

A snail is an equally comforting and discomfiting creature. Its ornamental shell is both a home and armor. Its glacial pace, often accompanied by a viscous sludge it leaves behind, make it a messy if inoffensive kind of pest. But for Grace Pudel, the human protagonist of director Adam Elliot’s wily, melancholy new animated feature “Memoir of a Snail,” that gastropod is a symbol of the life she’s resigned herself to. She turns to snails (both the live ones she cares for and handcrafted knickknack ones she collects) as a pressing reminder of the loneliness she swaddles around her, like a shell she doesn’t know how to discard, let alone live without.

Grace is the snail of Elliot’s title; she’s constantly wearing a hat adorned with two tentacled eyes made out of juggling balls. And the “memoir” we’re invited to observe is a wounding one, rife with heartbreak and trauma — but also, as it turns out, raunchy humor and slapstick pratfalls, literate puns and winking sight gags. Named best film at this year’s Annecy Animation Festival and, more recently, at the BFI London Film Festival, “Memoir of a Snail” (in theaters Oct. 25) is a triumph and handily one of the year’s best films.

When we first meet Grace (voiced with wry melancholy by “Succession’s” Sarah Snook), she is holding the hand of her elderly longtime friend Pinky (Jacki Weaver), who dies soon thereafter. It is one of many such losses Grace has experienced over the years. And so, with no one to talk to but her favorite snail Sylvia (named after “The Bell Jar” author and poet Sylvia Plath), Grace proceeds to regale her — and us, in turn — with her life’s story.

She begins at the very beginning, when she was yanked (prematurely, as it happens) from the womb she shared with her twin brother, Gilbert — a moment that left her an orphan with a cleft palate. Such a loss shatters the possible happy family Grace and Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) could’ve had. Instead, the bookworm twins are forced to witness their father, Percy, further wither and drink himself away: He’s a former Parisian juggler in a wheelchair after being hit by a drunk driver.

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Following Percy’s death, the twins are separated. Gilbert is sent to Perth to a family of religious fanatics, Grace to a nudist swinger couple in Canberra. It all plays like a modern riff on Roald Dahl, with that writer’s wit and penchant for the piquant cruelty of kids and adults alike, filtered through Elliot’s more wistful if equally whimsical sensibility.

In Grace, Elliot has crafted a bittersweet portrait of a wounded hoarder of a woman. Yet such a description doesn’t do “Memoir of a Snail” justice. This is no dour proposition. It’s filled with colorful side characters, like the sprightly Pinky, whose zest for life has not been tempered by her own past tragedies. Indeed, the Australian writer-director laces the film’s many tall tales — like how Pinky’s second husband was eaten by a crocodile right in front of her eyes — with sardonic humor meant to mollify and entertain in equal measure. (A shot of a bashful if satisfied croc makes for a kicker of a punchline.)

The filmmaker is helped by Snook’s oft-deadpan delivery. Her voice makes the many outlandish events she describes feel grounded in a reality that refuses the call to pity. There is a push instead toward empathy, toward imagining and caring for the inner worlds of those we might otherwise disregard. You can feel this as well in the tactility of Elliot’s stop-motion clay characters. Their lumpy shapes feel not like imperfections but visual reminders of the handcrafted nature of their creation, proof that they’ve been lovingly sculpted with the beauty of truth, not the tyranny of realism.

As in his previous feature, “Mary and Max” (2009), and in his Academy Award-winning short “Harvie Krumpet” (2003), “Memoir of a Snail” finds Elliot straddling a fine line between comedy and tragedy, between dark, thorny themes and bright, sunny hopes. Grace’s world may be awash in browns and grays and beiges, yet Elliot somehow makes that color palette feel vibrant and alive. Only a filmmaker as attuned to his character’s own plight would find the charm and playful possibilities in that titular animal, turning the winding swirl of its shell into a gorgeous motif about how best to look backward in order to move forward.

Despite its intimate focus, “Memoir of a Snail” is a towering achievement. This touching animated film serves as a reminder that Elliot is a humanist who clearly sculpts his “clayographies” (as he dubs his films) from the very essence of life itself.