Memoir of a Snail, Adam Elliot’s latest animated film is set in 1970s Australia. Credit: IFC Films

It’s been 15 years since Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot’s stop-motion animated masterpiece Mary & Max hit theaters and over two decades since he won an Academy Award for his short, animated film Harvie Krumpet.

Now, Elliot is back with the stop-motion feature Memoir of a Snail. Set in 1970s Australia, twins Grace (Sarah Snook) and Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) are sent to live in separate foster homes after their paraplegic father dies in his sleep.

Gilbert ends up living with a heartless, evangelical family while Grace is sent to live with a pair of swingers who aren’t very interested in being parents. Grace, who has become a hoarder, finds solace in raising snails and becoming friends with an eccentric old woman named Pinky (Jacki Weaver).

During a recent interview with the Current, Elliot talked about what fascinates him about stop-motion animation and how fellow filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (Pinocchio) has recently made his job as an animator easier. He also discussed what he’s most worried about when it comes to the impact of artificial intelligence on movies and other industries.

Memoir of a Snail is currently playing at Santikos Palladium, Santikos Embassy, Regal Cielo Vista and Regal Live Oak.

Where did the story for Memoir of a Snail come from?

This one started about eight years ago. My father had passed away and had left behind stuff that my siblings and I had to go through. We were very annoyed with him for leaving behind this mess. That annoyance led to an interest and fascination as to why as human beings we collect stuff that we don’t need. Why do we fill our homes with all this stuff?

Did you do any research on hoarding?

I started to read a lot of books into the psychology of it and spoke to psychologists. The more I researched, the more I discovered that more often than not, extreme hoarders have had a degree of trauma in their lives. More often than not, [it stems from] the loss of a child or a sibling or a twin. The hoarding becomes this sort of coping mechanism to deal with the pain and the loss and the suffering. I found it really interesting that there’s a deeper psychological reason often behind all that.

You had incredible success with Harvie Krumpet and Mary & Max, which is one of my favorite animated films ever. Some people might assume that you would have had your choice of projects to make over the years. Why has it been 15 years since your last film?

Great question. You know, life kept getting in the way. My father passed away, and I’m a caregiver for my mother as well. For me to start a new project, I really have to want to do it. I have to have an idea that I feel strongly about. That just didn’t come for quite a few years. Suddenly, 15 years had gone by. I’m as surprised as everyone else. Also, it was so mentally and physically exhausting making Mary & Max. I don’t think I was prepared again, but I slowly got my mojo back.

What is it about stop-motion animation that attracts you to the medium?

It has a beautiful, magical quality to it. Audiences find it very alluring. They don’t quite understand how it all works, but there’s something when they see the fingerprints and the textures on the clay. There’s something that stop-motion will always have over CGI and AI. Stop-motion is going through a bit of a renaissance with Guillermo del Toro and Wes Anderson (Fantastic Mr. Fox). There’s an appreciation of things that are handmade. It’s the same reason why everyone started to take up knitting and bread making and art during COVID. I don’t think AI is going to replace the human desire to make things.

Although your films are animated, they’re not for children. Do you think audiences understand animation better today and realize that it can be for adults, too?

Yeah, absolutely. In Guillermo’s Oscar speech [last year], he reminded everyone that animation is not a genre and that it’s an art form for anyone. It’s a medium for telling any story you want. I get emails from angry parents all the time saying, “Your films are not for children.” It’s like, “Of course they’re not. My films are rated R. You shouldn’t be taking your children to my films.” So, that’s always been a problem that I’ve rallied against my whole career.

Maybe what everyone needed was that acceptance speech from Guillermo to get the point across.

For 30 years, I’ve been banging on about stop-motion [and] animation not being a genre. But now I really think that there is a mind shift, and that Guillermo really helped advance that. He’s made my life easier. It’s a challenge, but there’s been a long history of adult animation, particularly from Eastern Europe [and] the Czech Republic. There’s a lot of Estonian animators who have always been dealing with dark subject matter. I love films that are dark, but I equally like comedies. That’s what my films are — a duality of comedy and tragedy.

Musician Pharrell Williams just produced a biopic called Piece by Piece that is a LEGO animation. I think it would be interesting to see your biopic as a stop-motion.

I think I’m quite a boring person, but if someone wants to make a film about my life, sure! There’s actually a recent biopic about Frida Kahlo, [Frida], which has a lot of animation in it. There’s a lot of documentaries now using animation as a vehicle for telling and communicating stories. I’m hoping to see more of it. I haven’t seen Piece by Piece yet, but I’ve heard a lot about it. As a concept, it’s a wonderful idea. I wish I had the money to do a CGI movie. I think animation is really advancing and evolving and taking all new sorts of forms, and that’s great. I just hope AI doesn’t come in and smother it all and ruin it. I think animation is in a really interesting phase of its evolution.

You said earlier that you don’t think AI is going to replace the human desire to make things, but do you believe we’re getting to a point where that option is going to be more available in aspects of life we’re not even thinking about right now? Won’t it be hard to say no to certain things if it makes the process easier?

I have no doubts that AI is just going to revolutionize everything, but it’s really up to us. We are hopefully in control of AI. We have to protect artists. During the actors’ strike last year, there was a realization that things were getting dangerous. So, everyone rallied together, and that was great. I think that it’s really up to us as a human species to make sure we don’t shoot ourselves in the foot.

I think I’m more worried as a writer than I am as a stop-motion animator. I’ve got a friend who’s a professional poet. AI, of course, can write poetry now. Everyone says, “Oh, it’s not very good,” but it’ll just get better and better. I don’t know. It’s like, if you could buy a loaf of bread that was made by a robot or a person, which one would you buy? At the moment, people will probably buy the bread made by the robot because it’s quite novel. But when it becomes mainstream, I think artisans and artists will always be the go-to first. Hopefully, as human beings, we respect that we need human beings.

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This article appears in Oct 30 – Nov 5, 2024.