In 2003, filmmaker Adam Elliot earned critical acclaim for his short film Harvie Krumpet, which earned over 100 awards, including the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film. Since then, Elliot has been hard at work creating memorable stop-motion films that have become the antithesis of the wholesome and cheery aesthetic of a standard Pixar film. In Elliot’s latest feature-length film, Memoir of a Snail, the Australian animator takes viewers on an emotional rollercoaster with hilarious highs and depressing lows. And that’s just the way he likes it.
Memoir of a Snail follows Grace Pudel, a book-loving, snail-obsessed outcast who is plagued by a series of misfortunes in the early part of her life. Things don’t exactly get better for Grace after she is separated from her twin brother and best friend, Gilbert. Despite enduring a seemingly constant wave of ordeals, Grace finds a glimmer of inspiration and hope when she begins a friendship with an eccentric elderly woman named Pinky. Memoir of a Snail features the voices of Sarah Snook, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Eric Bana, and Jacki Weaver.
Bubbleblabber sat down with Elliot to discuss his unique and quirky vision, the benefits of a great story, and whether claymation is really able to make you cry.
Matthew Swigonski: Obviously there are countless art forms out there and you just so happened to pick one of the hardest and most time-consuming forms there is. Why did you choose clay?
Adam Elliott: Yeah, well look… it was all a bit of an accident. I certainly didn’t have an aspiration to do stop-motion. I mean, I’d always drawn and was always going to do something creative, you know? I even wanted to be a portrait painter at one stage. So I didn’t go to film school until I was about 25. And even at film school, I was gonna maybe do 2D animation.
But my father owned a hardware store at the time, and the film lecturers were really pushing me to make my student film as a stop-motion. I was a bit reluctant, but it made sense because, you know, I could get access to chip paint and cheap Timber and materials and all the things you need to make a stop-motion for film. So, unfortunately, or fortunately, that short film did really well and won lots of prizes. And so I was like, “Oh, well, I’ll make another one.” And that’s sort of what I’ve been doing for 28 years; just making one film at a time, crossing my fingers, and hoping it would do okay.
And then that allows me to make the next one. So, here I am, seven films later. But yeah, I think also too, I’m glad I didn’t pursue 2D animation because I’d be a computer animator. And I’d be stuck behind a computer screen all day, and that’s something… I just get too agitated sitting for too long. I’m a very hands-on person, and I love making things and love getting my hands dirty. And so, it was all serendipitous, I suppose.
Matthew Swigonski: Oh, for sure. Do you think Memoir of a Snail would have worked as a 2D animated film, or do you think it lent itself to clay?
Adam Elliott: I mean, on one hand, I always say it’s story, story, story. And a good script really can be turned into… you know, I always say animation’s not a genre, it’s a medium. And there’s no reason why one of my scripts couldn’t be turned into a live-action film or a computer-animated film. But I think with stop-motion, there’s that added magical quality that it has; you know, the audience, when they see the fingerprints on the clay, they know that what they’re looking at is handmade.
And so, you get this extra level of appreciation and interest in stop-motion, which is why stop-motion is alive and well. Which is why directors like Wes Anderson and Guillermo Del Toro find it fascinating and want to make them; because it has this extra quality that other types of animation don’t have. But again, at the end of the day, it really comes down to the story. And that’s what I focus on the most, the story, less so the animation.
Matthew Swigonski: I imagine that the animation took a long time to do. Can you give us a rundown on the day-to-day life during the production?
Adam Elliott: Well, for example, I think the best starting point is to say that this film took 33 weeks just to animate, let alone the months and months it took to make everything. Because every prop, setting, and character was handmade, there’s not a single frame of CGI. So even the fire is yellow cellophane and the cigarette smoke is cotton balls. It’s all real stuff. The seven animators would come in, they’d do their 10-hour day, five days a week, 50 hours a week. And on average, each animator would do between five and ten seconds per day, which is roughly the equivalent to one shot.
So, one shot each per day in the film. There are over 1,500 shots. So yeah, very slow. I mean, it’s always challenging, but it’s quite… it’s quite meditative, animating. I mean, personally, I hate animating and I’ve given up animating; I’m not very good at it. The people I employ love it. They love being in the dark by themselves, moving these little characters millimeters at a time. And yeah, I think they love it because they get to play God. They get to bring these little blobs of clay to life.
Matthew Swigonski: I know I couldn’t do it. I don’t have the patience to do that. I would give up after three minutes and just storm off.
Adam Elliott: Yeah, it can be like watching paint dry. But, it’s interesting too. A lot of the people we employ are on the autism spectrum and to them, being alone in the dark is liberating. They don’t get annoyed. There are no bright lights. They can really obsess about what they’re doing.
Matthew Swigonski: You touched on the importance of story earlier. How long does it typically take you to come up with a script and then fine-tune it before starting the animation process?
Adam Elliott: Well, look, I’m a very slow writer. I do a lot of research. Memoir of a Snail took three years to write across 16 drafts. Because it’s about hoarding, I wanted to delve into the psychology behind it. I spoke to psychologists, did a lot of research, and read books on extreme hoarding to understand why people hoard the way they do. Also, the main character has a cleft palate, which is based on a friend of mine. She was born with a cleft palate and underwent many operations on her mouth, so I had to research that as well.
On top of that, I wanted to pack the film with as many gags as possible. Balancing all that darkness with comedy was tricky—getting the balance right so it wasn’t depressing but still had a happy, uplifting ending. Even though the audience might shed tears at the end, I hoped they’d be tears of happiness, not sadness.
Matthew Swigonski: What was more challenging for you—creating humor or exploring those dark, deep topics?
Adam Elliot: Some people find the reverse, but I find writing the gags pretty simple. I’m from a family of comedians, or so-called comedians [laughs]. The point is, it’s tricky. Because you want it to be visceral, you want it to be believable and palpable. And that’s tricky in stop-motion because obviously, these are blobs of clay.
So you’ve got to get the audience to empathize and believe that this is all happening. You don’t want it to become too saccharine either. You don’t want to be too sentimental. I mean, I think living in Australia too, Australians are very… what’s the word? They don’t like things to be too syrupy. Our population is quite reserved at times. They don’t like having their emotions boiled up and then rise to the surface. So that’s tricky too. Also, what’s tricky is writing in a universal manner. Writing characters that will be believable to people in Sweden, Iran, and Argentina.
Matthew Swigonski: I want to talk about Pinky’s montage in Memoir of a Snail, where she has her whole life neatly summarized. That was probably my favorite part of the movie. Was she the most fun character to develop in the entire production?
Adam Elliott: Yeah, she was a lot of fun to write because really, she’s THE character. She’s the comic relief. She’s the character everybody aspires to be. I think we all want to be Pinkies when we get older, where we don’t care what people think. We dress however we want. We’ve led a fantastic life. We’ve made love to John Denver. I would have loved to have written a lot more with Pinky in the film. But you know, she was already taking over too much. So I had to pull back a bit. But also, Pinky is not only just comical, she has her own backstory and her own moments of tragedy. And I didn’t want her just to be purely one-dimensional. Unlike Ken, who is a bit one-dimensional. Pinky was fun to write.
Matthew Swigonski: When you’re developing productions like Memoir of a Snail, do you find inspiration in fellow clay animators? Or are you just caught up in your own creative process?
Adam Elliott: I’m good friends with a lot of well-known stop-motion animators, like Nick Park. He’s done all the Wallace and Gromit films. I saw him a few weeks ago and we love catching up. We love talking about eyeballs and plasticine but really, that’s where the similarities stop. My films are certainly dark and they’re not really… definitely not for little kids. I certainly watch more live-action than I do animation. I don’t really watch much Disney or Pixar. I do love documentaries, love European cinema, and being a member of the academy, every year I get to watch some fantastic obscure films that you wouldn’t normally come across.
I also read a lot. I’m a big reader and I love finding inspiration from classic novels, which is why this film has a lot of classics in it. And I also love drawing. So, therefore, I love going to art galleries and I love looking at paintings and other artists’ work. So, in a nutshell, I don’t actually watch a lot of animation.
Matthew Swigonski: So where does your inspiration come from? Are you already working on your next story or is that something that just comes to you?
Adam Elliott: I write in a very intuitive way. And before I start writing, something has to annoy me or anger me. So that sort of is the trigger. This last film, my father had passed away, and he was a bit of a hoarder himself. He left behind a big pile of stuff and I had to start sorting through. I was really annoyed with him. But that annoyance led to fascination. So that’s what normally happens. And at the moment, I don’t want to make any more films where the characters are locked in their bedrooms in suburbia. I feel like I’ve done that to death. I want to do a road film.
I think because I had so much fun writing Pinky. I want to make a film about an elderly woman. Of course, the film Thelma just came out, which is about a lovely woman who goes on a bit of a road trip. But mine will be very, very different to that. But it’s the early days and it’ll take me a couple of years to write it. I’m looking forward to really sinking my teeth into the next script. I think now it’s time to do something a little bit different.