When Adam Elliot first took up stop-motion animation at Melbourne’s Victorian College of the Arts in the 90s, he was told it was a dying art form. Now, one Oscar, five short films, two features and nearly 30 years later, he seems to have done his bit to keep it alive. Albeit in films that feature quite a lot of death and dying and damaged people in bittersweet stories, often based on childhood, but not really for children. They might be animated movies, but not many characters in Elliot’s films live happily ever after. His characters are brought to life as oddball figures of wire, clay and plasticine, and given distinctive voices by distinguished Australians. Elliot’s voice casts have included Geoffrey Rush, Barry Humphries, Renée Geyer, Eric Bana, Toni Collette, and in his new film, Succession star Sarah Snook, fellow actors Magda Szubanski and Jacki Weaver and musician Nick Cave.
“I knew when I started out in animation, computer animation was on the horizon, and I thought, ‘I just don’t want to be stuck behind a computer screen all day,” Elliot tells the Listener, explaining why he took on the snail-paced, frame-by-frame technique. “I realised that it was a combination of all the things I love – I love making things, I love drawing. I love cinematography, I love cameras and lenses, I love making comedies, but I also love making people upset. I love humour, pathos, poignancy and classical music. It’s an amalgamation of all my interests all rolled into one medium and form.”
His first film-school short, Uncle from 1996, led to a semi-autobiographical trilogy with the subsequent Brother and Cousin. His 2003 short film Harvie Krumpet, about a man beset by terrible luck and eternal optimism, won the Oscar for best animated short, bringing Elliot’s style and black humour to wider notice. In 2009 came Elliot’s debut feature Mary and Max, in which Collette voiced a girl who begins a pen pal friendship with Max, a morbidly obese middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger syndrome, voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman.
The film was narrated by Humphries, whose work, especially the melancholy monologues of character of Sandy Stone, Elliot thinks were influential on his sensibilities. So was cartoonist Michael Leunig. “I love people who are able to combine comedy and tragedy, humour and pathos … so I was always drawn to two artists who got that balance.
“Barry took risks his whole life, too, offended people, and towards the end, he got cancelled. But I think as a storyteller, entertainer, whatever you call yourself, you have to push the boundaries and take risks, because otherwise the art form that you’re working on becomes stale and then it will die. So, I’m always trying not to offend, but certainly provoke and be thought-provoking and provocative.”
Elliot released another short “clayography” – his word – in 2015, entitled Ernie Biscuit, about a deaf Parisian taxidermist. The film was partly an experiment in finding techniques to make his films more efficient and to get budgets down after Mary and Max, which had cost A$8 million and lost money.
He’d also thought the look of Mary and Max was becoming too refined. “I really prefer the aesthetic and production values of my shorts because they’re chunky, wonky and obviously handmade, and I know that what the audience finds appealing is that handmade look. A lot of stop-motion has become too slick and too reliant on 3D printers, and I didn’t want to become a victim to all that technology.”
Still, it’s been a fair gap between his previous film and the new second feature, Memoir of a Snail. It’s possibly an unwelcome question to ask anyone involved in stop-animation: What took you so long?
“Well, you know, life got in the way a bit. Mary and Max was such a difficult film to make and afterwards I was exhausted, depleted. But then my father passed away. I went through some depression, Covid hit, and this film took forever to write.
“For some reason, I’ve just become a slower writer. I’m more finicky. You’d think I’d be speeding up as the years passed by. But no, I’m slowing down, which is scary, because I’ve probably only got one more film left,” says the 52-year-old.
Memoir of Snail is the story of Grace Pudel, who was born with a cleft palate and grows up in very brown 1970s Melbourne. She is separated from her gay twin brother and protector, Gilbert, after they are left orphans. She goes to live in even browner Canberra, becomes a hoarder of ornamental snails, makes friends with the elderly but sprightly Pinky, a woman who has lived a very colourful life. She eventually goes to film school and – in a meta touch – starts making stop-motion films.
As he has done before, Elliot based characters on himself and people in his life – “Max” was inspired by his own New York pen pal who has recently died. Part of Grace’s childhood is based on a friend who was born with a severe cleft palate. His parents were what he describes as “extreme collectors”. Family members also figured in the stories to his early shorts.
“With each film, I always have a very worried set of relatives, and I never let on who’s in what, and never let them read the scripts. But they all know by now that they’re going to appear eventually, but it’s all tongue in cheek. I just had to show the film to all my relatives in Canberra, and of course, I don’t paint a very good picture of Canberra. I was terrified that they would disown me … but no, they all understood.”
With a team of seven animators, Memoir of a Snail took 33 weeks to shoot and six months to edit. A team of 20 had spent almost a year crafting 7000 items, including 3000 handmade ornamental snails in Grace’s collection. Why snails?
The swirl on a shell is a wonderful motif of life going full cycle and snails are always moving forward … there’s something about a snail that is poetic.
“Well, originally it was ladybirds, but after the first draft, it was all getting a bit cutesy and twee. One of the first things I animated in clay was a snail. I suddenly discovered that there were all these wonderful metaphors, like the touching of their antennas and then retracting. That’s what Grace is doing in her life. She’s retracting from the world, going into her shell, her self-imposed cage. The swirl on a shell is a wonderful motif of life going full cycle and snails are always moving forward … there’s something about a snail that is poetic.”
There’s other poetry in the film, too. Nick Cave makes a vocal cameo reciting a verse in a film that can occasionally resemble a Cave song, especially in the section dealing with Grace’s brother Gilbert and his religious adoptive family.
“Someone suggested Nick Cave, and immediately I thought, ‘Oh yes, because that character has to be a poet and has to read a poem,’ and I’m an amateur poet myself, and a very egotistical idea of mine was, ‘Well, Nick Cave could read one of my poems. So I get two for two for the price of one.’ We never thought we’d get him.”
Elliot suspects Cave’s recent foray into ceramic figurines may have helped him warm to the idea of a clay-based movie.
The main voice in the film, though, belongs to Grace, voiced by Sarah Snook, the Australian actress best known for her Emmy-winning role as Siobhan “Shiv” Roy in Succession.
“She ticked every box. She’s quite a shy person. She’s very different to the character she plays in Succession. She has this wonderful quietness. There’s a vulnerability.
“Also, I didn’t want an actor where they had to put on a voice. I just wanted their natural speaking voice, and the trouble is, a lot of Australian actors, when they go overseas, start to lose their Australian accents, or they become thicker, for some reason, and more pronounced. Hers was just a lovely speaking voice that’s not too overbearing and when she read the screenplay, she really understood what I was trying to do.”
Meanwhile, Elliot is steeling himself for the long, slow trail for this next film.
“Someone worked out recently, what I have been earning per hour over all these years. It’s like $1.50 an hour. It’s not about money. I think, you know, I’m at that phase now where the film’s finished and I’m listening to people’s responses and knowing that some things work, some things don’t quite work, some things don’t work at all, and then learning from that, and then moving on to the next thing.”
Memoir of a Snail is in cinemas from November 7.
