“Memories of a snail”, born to be saliva – Libération

In July 2024 in Annecy, the Australian Adam Elliot joined Henry Selick (Nightmare Before ChristmasCoraline) in the very exclusive club of filmmakers to have won two feature film awards at the international animated film festival. After winning it in 2009 with his first film Mary and Maxa lovely story of two solitudes intertwined in a world of plasticine, the Australian once again won over the jury, fifteen years later, with Memoirs of a Snail. A second film which took its time, as it should for these titanic projects that constitute stop-motion feature films, especially when you have a team of only seven animators. The object alone constitutes a challenge to reason.

The matter is all the more unreasonable since Adam Elliot’s cinema is not at all intended for a child audience. Opening with the last rattle of a screaming grandmother “potatoes” before passing the weapon to the left, Memoirs of a snail comes to chronicle, in the first person, the (shit) life of the young girl who held his hand. The story of a premature baby who, with her twin, lost her mother in childbirth. Two fragile children raised by a paraplegic and alcoholic (but kind) French acrobat in social housing with paper walls j