Memoir of a Snail

Memoir of a Snail (2024) is an Australian stop-motion animated feature you can watch online on iFILM, written and directed by Adam Elliot, whose earlier clay-animated short Harvey Krumpet took home an Academy Award in 2003. Sarah Snook voices Grace, a lonely collector of ceramic snails living in 1970s Canberra; Cody Smit-McPhee plays her twin brother, and Jackie Weaver brings warmth and chaos to Pinky, the eccentric older woman who refuses to leave Grace alone.

Grace and her brother are separated after their parents die, and she spends the following years accumulating objects and keeping people out. Then Pinky shows up — loud, unfiltered, comfortable with her own wreckage — and the two form a friendship that doesn't fix anything so much as make the weight of it bearable. The film covers decades in under 94 minutes, moving between grief, dark comedy, and something that occasionally feels close to joy.

Elliot is one of the few animators working today who builds films around people the world tends to overlook — awkward, bruised, quietly surviving. This one is sadder than it lets on and funnier than you expect, which is precisely what makes it linger. Stream Memoir of a Snail (2024) online on iFILM.