How Adam Elliot crafted the Golden Globe-nominated film Memoir of a Snail | Canada Voices

It’s hard to describe the journey that stop motion tragicomedy Memoir of a Snail takes you on, except to say that it feels a whole lot like a therapy session. That is kind of the point, says writer, producer and director Adam Elliot, whose ethos is always to offer something real and, therefore, something that provokes, and whose previous work includes 2009′s equally moving animation Mary and Max.

Yet again, he delivers a gothic odyssey, this one following a young Australian girl named Grace Pudel (voiced by Succession’s Sarah Snook), who lives with her twin brother Gilbert and father Percy, a former juggler who is now a paraplegic alcoholic. The twins’ mother, meanwhile, died in childbirth. Fortunately, the charming pair are especially close; Gilbert even wards off bullies who mock Grace’s cleft lip. Things take yet a darker turn, however, when Percy dies in his sleep one day, and the twins are sent to separate foster homes.

As she counts the days until she can one day reunite with her brother, Grace begins collecting snails, who serve as an oddly perfect metaphor for the story’s many highs and lows, captured best by this featured quote by Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard: “Life can only be understood backward, but we have to live it forwards.”

Elliot, whose film received a Golden Globe nod earlier this week, spoke with The Globe from his home in Australia.

Where did the idea for this film come from? And was any of it personal?

Absolutely, yes. All my films are based on a degree of truth and on my family and friends. This film is based on a friend of mine who was born with a severe cleft palate and, as a little girl, she had a lot of operations on her mouth, and was bullied and teased a lot at school for it. She grew up to be a very well-adjusted fashion designer, very flamboyant and eccentric.

But also, my parents were collectors. I’ve been a collector/hoarder, and so I’ve always been fascinated by the psychology of hoarding. Why do we fill our homes with things that don’t mean anything or that we don’t need? For some, it’s a coping mechanism. Extreme hoarders tend to have had a lot of trauma or loss in their lives and, more often than not, have experienced the loss of a child. So, the way of coping with this grief is by filling their homes with stuff that acts as a barrier and buffer from the outside world.

It’s all these sorts of ideas I get very obsessed with, and then I do a lot of research. That’s why my films take so long to write.

I’ve got to ask: why snails? Do you have a personal affection for them?

I sure do. I collected them as a child in Australia, where they often appear in people’s letter boxes, eating mail. When I was writing this script, I quickly settled on snails rather than any other creature, because I thought they were just a wonderful metaphor for what Grace was going through. You touch a snail’s antennas and they retract into their shell; that’s what Grace is doing her whole life. I also love the swirl on a snail’s shell, and I decided to use that as a visual motif, because it’s very symbolic of life going full circle. And then I discovered that snails can’t reverse, they can only move forward. It’s all these little connections and tie-ins. Originally, it was going to be “Memoir of a Lady Bird,” and I wrote one draft of that script but it was all getting a bit cutesy and twee. And then the film Lady Bird came out, so it couldn’t be lady birds.

While watching the film, I was reminded of a lot of children’s books and art I loved as a kid. Do you have any specific influences when it comes to your style of animation?

My influences are very varied, but they include children’s literature, like Edward Gorey. Also the Muppets and Sesame Street. I love any art forms that have a duality of light and dark, comedy and tragedy. Life is a balance of the dark and the light, and all our lives ride that roller coaster, so I think it’s the oldest form of storytelling. I’m trying to reflect real life, and even though these are blobs of clay, I’m trying to get the audience to believe that they’re very real, they have a soul, a heartbeat.

The film is very sad, but it’s also very hopeful. How do you weave those two things together?

It is very challenging. I have a very simple ambition: if the audience aren’t an emotional wreck by the end of the film, then I failed as a writer. But I also want them to leave the cinema uplifted, and have tears of happiness, not sadness. That’s why I like happy endings. I really believe you need to take the audience to a dark place so that when those moments of levity come along with those moments of comedy, it’s a release of tension. And I always think that a joke can be funnier if the scene before was darker.

Do you think it’s easier in a way for us to process traumas and tough feelings through animation?

I think animation is a perfect vehicle and medium for dealing with challenging subject matters. The remark I get the most is, “Oh, I didn’t ever think an animated film could have such an impact on me.” To me, that’s very rewarding, because that’s exactly my intent, to make sure the film is not just entertaining, but also thought-provoking. I don’t think my films would work as live-action films, because I think the beauty in animation is that we have that wonderful tool of exaggeration. We can exaggerate the characters faces. We can make a poignant moment more poignant, we can heighten emotion.

How does it feel to see people watch this film and be moved by it?

I always say I feel relieved, not elated or excited. The eight years that I went through with my crew was worthwhile. The audience will never appreciate the blood, sweat and tears that have gone into making any film, let alone a stop motion one. But I feel relief that the film is resonating with audiences and, I’ll be honest, it means I’ll be allowed to make another one.

This interview has been edited and condensed.