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Animation is sadly dismissed rather frequently by those who see themselves as the highest authorities of the film industry, often (and unfairly) looked down upon as a kids-only form of entertainment and constantly mislabeled as a genre. Despite the immense amount of time and effort that usually goes into the making of animated shorts and features (in many cases, far more than the typical live-action production), rarely does any of that effort receive the appreciation it deserves; while animated films are certainly some of the most financially successful releases of a given year, and there are more than a few that are subjected to overwhelming critical praise, none of it ever amounts to anything substantial where it arguably matters most: during awards season. With the exception of the token Best Animated Feature and Best Animated Short categories (and, on occasion, one of the music-oriented categories), animated films have hardly any chance of being named the winner of a festival or awards ceremony’s highest honor, typically a Best Picture prize of some variant with equal merit. Even at the Academy Awards, possibly the most revered annual film awards show, only three animated films – 1991’s “Beauty and the Beast”, 2009’s “Up”, and 2010’s “Toy Story 3” – have been nominated for Best Picture, and none of them have been fortunate enough to win the prize. All of this proves how little respect the art of animation generally receives from the greater cinema intelligentsia, but it also makes the few instances where animation has been able to triumph all the more noteworthy. One such instance actually just occurred at the London BFI Film Festival, with its most sought-after prize going to a rather unexpected contender, that being an independent stop-motion animated feature by the name of “Memoir of a Snail”.
From the title alone, the premise of “Memoir of a Snail” may seem quite mundane, suggesting a focus on the life of a creature that most run into on a regular basis and probably doesn’t have that much going on that one might consider exciting. However, this tragicomedy is actually anything but mundane; with its narrative directing the majority of its attention toward Grace, a young girl living in 1970s Australia viewed as something of a misfit by those around her, the film (its title a reference to the character’s fondness for collecting snails) follows Grace’s transition from childhood to adulthood and the various challenges that she contends with throughout. While this may all seem like the standard coming-of-age fare, how the film executes such a premise, at least according to those who’ve been fortunate enough to see the film, is quite exceptional, with the story exploring a variety of subject matters far more mature than one might expect from a film that looks the way it does. Despite a cast that features notable names like Eric Bana, Jackie Weaver, and Kodi Smit-McPhee, the true MVP of this picture is director Adam Elliot, a creator of stop-motion animation based in Melbourne who’d previously made such films as “Harvie Krumpet” and “Mary and Max” (the former of which earned Elliot an Academy Award for Best Animated Short in 2004). It would appear that Elliot, if not the most famous of stop-motion filmmakers, has nonetheless garnered a highly respectable reputation throughout a career that has spanned several decades, and it would appear that the overwhelmingly positive reception that “Memoir of a Snail” has so far received is doing very little to change that.
Earlier this year, “Memoir of a Snail” already proved its worth as a feature worthy of major recognition with its winning of the Cristal Award for Animated Feature, the highest honor that can be bestowed at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, but its surprise win at the BFI London Film Festival proves that it’s more than capable of standing out among those that aren’t also made within the animated medium. Upon naming the film as the winner of the Best Film award of the festival’s Official Competition, jury leader Alexandra Phillipe expressed a great deal of enthusiasm for “Memoir of a Snail” and how much it had moved her and several of her fellow jurors. Describing the film as a “singular achievement in filmmaking” as well as “emotionally resonant and constantly surprising , Phillipe and the jury further praised Elliot’s animated creation for “[tacking] pertinent issues such as bullying, loneliness and grief head-on, creating a crucial and universal dialogue in a way that only animation can. The jury is delighted to recognise an animated film alongside its live-action peers”.
Although “Memoir of a Snail” was without question the biggest winner of the BFI London Film Festival, which began on Wednesday, October 9th and concluded on Sunday, October 20th (interestingly, with another animated feature designed in a stop-motion style, Morgan Neville’s Pharrell Williams LEGO biography “Piece by Piece”), there were nonetheless quite a few other films that were fortunate enough to receive some acknowledgement from festival jurors. One film that was given a Special Mention, for example, was Rungano Nyoni’s “On Becoming a Guinea Fowl”, which already garnered a good amount of attention at the Cannes Film Festival earlier this year and continued to attract interest as it arrived in London, largely through its “intricately crafted story brimming with imagination that dares to say the unsayable about a sexual predator in a close-knit Zambian community”. Then there’s Laura Carreira’s “On Falling”, which was given the Sutherland Award (an accolade designated for first-time feature filmmakers) and allowed Carreira to become the first British filmmaker to earn the prize since 2010. The jury that gave out this specific award, one led by Dionne Edwards, praised “On Falling” as a “richly-layered portrait of a world governed by corporate profit motive, as seen through the story of an immigrant woman whose alienation [they] feel deeply, told with masterful cinematic precision and understated, lived in performances” before then calling the film “a powerful, mesmerising and bold first feature”. In this category, another animated film was fortunate enough to be named as a special mention: Pchardo Espaillat’s “Olivia and the Clouds”. Between it and “Memoir of a Snail” being named Best Film, the medium of animation may still have a long way to go before it can be given the same amount of respect and admiration as its live-action counterpart, but there are still those who are willing to reject the preconceptions surrounding this particular art form and speak out in order to acknowledge its value.
