Memoir of a Snail / Mad God

Two visually innovative, emotionally grim animated features.

From this site and this one, via the linkies. Fair use.

Memoir of a Snail (2024). Grade: C-. Mad God (2021). Grade: C-

When I first wanted to introduce Mrs. twinsbrewer to the Wallace & Gromit films/shorts, she was initially reluctant; she found claymation creepy. (And now enjoys a lot of it, particularly Shaun the Sheep and The Boxtrolls.)

Why creepy? British animator Chris Hopewell said “I think people connect with the fact that it’s a bit clicky and, not unnerving, but a bit eerie … The way that stop motion puppets, especially human puppets, move has a spidery clickiness to it. I’ve had this theory for years that people find stop motion a bit eerie because it has that insect-y movement. We’re pre-programmed to pay attention if you see something moving or clicking like a spider or scorpion. Stop motion has that same real-but-not-real look to it, and it can be quite entrancing.”

That’s an interesting theory, although the critters he describes are arachnids, not insects… the movement of insects can sometimes be quite lovely. (Unless they go BZZZZ.) I also think the real cheapness of some children’s claymation has a creepy vibe to it. Not cheap as in money, but cheap as in poorly written, having little imagination, taking advantage of the way children are drawn to animation even if the content is crummy. Everyone loves Rudolph, but the later Rankin/Bass Christmas specials don’t have the same level of quality — especially not the same level of songwriting. And Gumby, that sort of thing.

That Hopewell quote was a reference from this wonderful Wiki article about the history of stop-motion animation. (Claymation is a specific kind of stop-motion animation, there are different labels for other varieties.) I just wanted to find out when the first stop-motion feature film was made (around 1930-1935), and ended up follwing a lot of links to a lot of places. As one does with the best Wiki articles. It beats reading the news.

Interestingly, while film pioneer Willis O’ Brien’s King Kong was a huge success, most of the feature films done entirely with stop-motion animation were in Europe. American films continued to use stop-motion mostly the way King Kong did, as animated figures in live-action films. The brilliant Ray Harryhausen did many of these, and had worked under O’ Brien.

Outside of art-house audiences, I think the first stop-motion films widely seen in America were The Nightmare Before Christmas and Chicken Run. And there’s been roughly one or so a year to come out since then. It’s awfully expensive and/or time-consuming to do.

Most of the ones produced are from a small handful of companies; there’s Aardman, which made Wallace & Gromit and Chicken Run and Shaun the Sheep; Laika, which made Nightmare and The Boxtrolls; a few others make pet projects for well-known directors like Tim Burton or Guillermo del Toro. Most Aaardman films resemble each other, most Laika films resemble each other. Tim Burton’s animated films look like each other, Wes Anderson’s look like everything else Wes Anderson’s ever done.

Memoir of a Snail and Mad God are unusual in that they look distinctive from all the other stop-motion films out there. They’re more personal artistic statements than the movies that get wider release. And I think that’s both an impressive achievement, and a bit of a serious flaw.

Memoir of a Snail is by Australian filmmaker Adam Elliot, who’s been making short films since 1996; this is his second full-length feature. It had almost universal critical praise, and you should always be wary of anything that does, these days. It often means something that makes critics feel clever to “get,” yet really is shallow at the core.

It starts so promisingly, I thought that maybe the critics wre right! There’s a swooping, magnificently detailed credits sequence, set to a wonderful emotional score (by Uzbek-Australian composer Elena Kats-Shernin). The camera floats and dives around a curious collection of objects, from classic literature to toilet seats. It’s clearly the collection of an offbeat individual, so that’s what you imagine the movie will be about. The celebration of some weird, interesting person.

Well, in a way, it is? But mostly it just rains down misery after misery on its main character, Grace. That interesting collection of objects? It’s because Grace is a hoarder, and a loner, whose only friend in the world is her twin brother Gilbert. Their mother died at birth, and their alcoholic dad became partially paralyzed and in poor health after a drunk-driving accident, and after Dad dies, Grace and Gilbert are placed in different foster home, far away from each other. Where they’re either neglected or abused.

Grace does have one other friend, Pinky, an elderly woman ripped straight off from Ruth Gordon in Harold & Maude (which, to be fair, quite a few movies have stolen from). But Pinky’s dead. That’s what starts the movie.

We do see some of Pinky’s adventures, in flashback, all of which are a mixture of attempted comedy/tragedy. Like she has two husbands die, and one’s eaten by a crocodile on a wildlife safari. That croc’s actually quite cute… and that sums up what I found offputting about the movie.

Grace’s miseries are all very real things that people suffer. She had a cleft palate as a child and was bullied over it. Her adult depression is something many people I’ve known have suffered. She struggles with body shame and weight gain; again, so have people I’ve known. I don’t know about the foster system in Australia, but the American one is famous for a lack of proper oversight (because of a lack of adequate funding). Grace’s one romantic interest ends up being an emotionally controlling sicko.

So why is the tone straining so hard for lightearted quirkiness? The Harold & Maude-type stuff, that cute crocodile? This is a movie I would find deeply insulting if I had some of the same problems Gracie does (and I’ve wrestled with depression at times). It feels like the miseries aren’t piled on for any reason other than to manipulate the audience into “caring.” It feels empty at heart. I’m sure many people are touched by it; that’s fine. It felt like the simulation of feeling, to me.

There’s a possibly Dickensian inspiration to this; the ending has some twists that are practically right out of Great Expectations if you juggled the plot pieces around a bit. But Dickens was also passionately saying something about the conditions of poverty in 19th-century England. (While keeping an eye out for the quick buck; that’s why the books always have some insufferably sweet & perfect characters to win over sentimental audiences.) What is this movie saying? I can’t make it out. I’m with Chicago film critic Matt Pais, who wrote that the movie “might have worked as a testament to resilience … if it spent more time in the nuances it seems to identify about people who grow up without a steady support system.”

I will hand it to writer/director Adam Elliot; the movie looks unique. He has other short films, which all seem to be about similar subjects. I won’t be seeing these. If he ever makes an autobiographical movie, maybe — Wiki says he was “raised in the Australian outback on a prawn farm by his father, Noel, a retired acrobatic clown, and his mother Valerie, a hairdresser.” Now THAT’s something I’d like to watch!

Mad God has an even more distinctive look, and was truly a labor of love. It’s by special-effects wizard Phil Tippett. If you’ve seen the enjoyable cheapie horror trash Pirhana, you’ll remember a few seconds of some weird little frog/fish/homonculus; that was Tippett’s. The stop-motion in The Empire Strikes Back, Dragonslayer, the nasty ED-209 robot in Robocop, all of those have Tippett’s hand in their design. He helped teach CGI animators how to make the dinos move believably in Jurassic Park, and directed basically all the effects scenes in Starship Troopers.

Tippett spent 30 years working on this, almost entirely through self-funding and Kickstarter. He’d get young volunteers to help him with the model work, and teach them everything they needed to know. And he became so obsessed with it, he ended up in a psychiatric facility for a brief stretch.

I believe it. You can see that obsession in every detail of every image. It’s one of the most stunning-looking things I’ve ever seen. A genuine original work of art like few movies ever made.

And I turned it off halfways and I will never finish it. It’s intentionally disgusting and grim.

Tippett says he was inspired by reading the history of Hell (our depictions of it, anyways), and by reading Joseph Campbell, whose work about how all human stories retell the same myth has been widely influential (and I happen to think it’s crapola). “Stories are indeed innate within mankind,” says Tippett, which is why this movie is exactly like Whiskey Galore! Except, it’s NOT. That idea’s bunk.

There’s real vision at work here. It’s like if you read everything you could about the horrors of war and environmental destruction and then dropped a ton of acid while staring at Hieronymous Bosch paintings. A main figure wanders through these hellscapes, looking like the alien-virus-patients in the Doctor Who episodes “The Empty Child/The Doctor Dances,” with a gas mask for a face. As it does, we see monster upon moster devouring tortured victims of unimaginable fantastic misery, only for each monster to be tortured and devoured in turn.

The concept is obviously how, if there is in fact a God or Gods, it/they must be evil, since evil always seems to win out in our world. (It begins with a line from Leviticus 26:29 — “You shall eat the flesh of your sons, and the flesh of your daughters… I will make the land desolate, and your enemies who settle in it will be appalled at it.”) I understand this point of view, and there are days when I share this point of view. But on other days I think of the best (the only) good line from Robert Bolt’s script to The Mission in 1986. One character says “such is the world.” Another replies “no — such have we made it.” (It’s a paraphrase from memory, but you get the gist.)

It’s an impressive movie. It’s also a repellent one, whose hideousness has nothing I find useful. I would encourage fans of truly original work to at least give this a look, and I’m glad I did. But please nobody tell me it’s worth it if I finish the rest. I don’t wanna and I’m not gonna. So there.

I found these Tippett quotes (from a The Guardian interview by John Bleasdale) interesting:

“‘I appreciate silent movies a great deal. I believe when sound came it destroyed an essential part of the creative process of film-making.” … More recent innovations have left him less than impressed. “Everything’s gone in the toilet.” When I mention Avatar he shakes his head: “I’m not a big fan of that movie, or Jim Cameron movies, because he doesn’t have any humour. Even when he tries, it falls flat.’”

I’m with him on the Cameron stuff!

I understand that a movie by Aardman or Laika has a whole team of writers, directors, storyboard artists, animators, and the like, all of whom can help bring different ideas to a project — while the vision of an Adam Elliot or Phil Tippet is theirs alone. So theirs are the more daring artistic feats. Yet sometimes it helps to have extra minds providing input. Neither of these visually innovative films have enough material in them to be satisfying as dramatic works. I salute the artists more than I do the art.