MEMOIR OF A SNAIL (Cert. 15) concerns the allure but also the problematic issues of living a shell-like existence in Australia. It offers a comforting but delusional view of our place in creation. Grace Pudel is, with good reason, uncomfortable in her own skin. Her mother died soon after giving birth to her and her twin brother Gilbert. Inseparable, they had, the nurse said, two souls but one heart.

Then came the death of their beloved father, which leads to Gilbert’s being allotted to scary Christian fundamentalist foster parents two thousand miles away in Perth, while Grace is assigned to swingers in Canberra. The couple are nice enough, but their hedonistic lifestyle takes priority over home life. This and much more is recounted by Grace to Sylvia her pet snail and only friend. Not the most physically attractive of children, Grace is regularly bullied at school now she hasn’t a brother for protection. Her general unease becomes increasingly acute until she meets Pinky, a quirky old woman, who has lived life abundantly.

This is the moment to mention that the film is not only touching, but often hilarious. The reason lies with how the story is told. The medium is the message; for this is a stop-motion “clayography” animation movie, made familiar to viewers through the Wallace and Gromit films. Memoir of a Snail won Best Film Prize at the 2024 BFI London Film Festival, the first time ever for an animated feature. It continues Adam Elliot’s thought-provoking exploration of the human soul.

As was seen in his comedy-drama Mary and Max (2009), light can shine through even the darkest of situations — not that one will find it in Gilbert’s situation, in which hypocritical churchgoers impose draconian sanctions on anyone deviating from their intolerant views. They take Leviticus 24’s eye for an eye entirely literally. Despite working slavishly at his foster parents’ Garden of Eden Fruit Farm, Gilbert (who wants to be a fire eater) is deemed full of the devil. A roughneck baptism is designed to “de-Satanise” the boy. When that fails, they fight fire with all-consuming fire.

Contrast this with Grace’s experiences, which follow a Christian, if unstated, journey. Step by step, she is coaxed into abandoning what she describes as her protective “cage”, and dares to be free. Self-chosen isolation defers to new possibilities. The warmth and spontaneity of Pinky (wonderfully voiced by Jacki Weaver) provides the necessary support for being alive. Grace falls in love with Ken, whose hobby in repairing bowls is motivated by Kintsugi, the Japanese philosophy that anything broken is repairable. The art form deliberately displays any damage done to vessels en route to being made whole. As with ceramics, so with humans: we are imperfect beings moving towards salvation.

Grace’s spiritual development grows by telling Sylvia her story, wounds and all. Through such reflection she realises life can only be understood backwards but that we’ve got to live forward. Our heroine learns, admittedly at a snail’s pace, to live with hope for herself and a world in which even the bad times play their part in a pilgrimage of grace.