In Japan, “Kintsugi” is called a traditional repair technology for broken shells or ceramic vases. Where we – here, or rather today – might tend to return to the shards sigh and to find our way with the loss of a loved one, but at least used object, these shards are carefully put together in the spirit of the Kintsugi and finally decorates the break lines with gold or other precious precious metals. What breaks can be repaired, and our break points are nothing for which we have to be ashamed. Rather, in the philosophy of Kintsugi everything becomes more and more beautiful, increasingly precious due to its breakage. However, the fact that the lonely Grace Pudel (voice in the original: Sarah Snook) proves to be known to this philosophy, but then proves to be quite a creep in the end, even as a further disappointment in a breach that does not live in broken.
Grace himself tells us about this in retrospect-about a moment of death and grief, on which the protagonist of the Oscarnominated stop-motion animated film “Memoirs of a snail“Apparently with everything.” I have not always been lonely “, her story begins, although the melancholic girl is confronted with all kinds of pain, loss and need in her childhood. The birth of Grace and her twin brother Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) does not survive her mother, and father Percy (Dominique Pinon) has to find out on the brutal tour that Sydney is not the right plaster for French street artists: After a bad accident, he becomes a cross-average alcoholic.
Gilbert (Kodi Smit-McPhee) promised his twin sister that he would run across Australia if necessary to finally see them again.
It is a hard fabric that the Australian animated film director and Oscar winner Adam Elliot excites us in his second full-length movie (after the kneading culture classic “Mary & Max or Schrumpf sheep when it rains?” From 2009). And yet “Memoirs of a snail” not only turn out to be one of the most touching, but also one of the most human and in some way even the most hopeful films that have been seen in the cinema for a long time. In order to penetrate this hope, we first have to accompany Grace and Gilbert through all kinds of blows of fate. Because after the death of their father, the twins are first put into a state orphanage – and then adopted, but not together, but individually at the end of the large continent.
While Grace is absorbed by a well-meaning pair of swingers that, despite all the sincere efforts, never really build a relationship with the adoptive subsidiary, Gilbert gets into the claws of Christian-foundal apple farmers who have a whole crowd of orphans like slaves. A story like from a novel by Charles Dickens, in which Gilbert always lets his beloved sister participate through letters – and one day, he promises her, he will walk through the whole, wide country to return to her. On foot, across the desert.
Golden shimmering scars
For Grace, too, the years are moving into the country, from the bullied and beaten schoolgirl with the snail cap, a lonely librarian, who lives withdrawn, becomes withdrawal. Fortunately, there is Pinky (Jacki Weaver), this exalted, old lady, who wrested the dementia, who becomes a single friend and told her about life, which is stuffed with joy and adventure. A friend who has experienced everything that misses the sad grace. And which is also there for her and helps her out of mental and physical need, when the unexpected happiness that Grace finds on the side of the microwave repairer Ken (Tony Armstrong) finds a soap bubble filled with belly fat.
Until the last breath with which death tears apart the life friends – in the very first scene of “memoirs of a snail”, the moment when Grace also seems to be finally given up and concluded with life. And yet, the story is not yet over, Pinky has a last gift to make Grace, and the shards that our lives sometimes break always deserve to be glued together again. Our scars shimmer gold.
With Ken (Tony Armstrong), Grace (Sarah Snook) finds romantic love for the first time. But the microwave representative hides a fat-draining secret.
For eight years, director Adam Elliot has worked on the production of “Memoirs of a snail”-without any CGI support, exclusively with a single picture for single-picture photographed plasticine figures and scenes. The world that he brings to life on the screen in this elaborate process is dark, almost monochrome and full of disappointments and pain – and yet full of beauty and magic. Like the greatest masters of the animated film, Elliot does not focus on an apparent form of realism in the design of his worlds, but rightly trusts that his characters can also meet us in the heart.
Elliot definitely didn't make a children's film – or at least there would be a lot of young audience with an overly young audience to discuss a lot from parental side. In “Memoirs of a snail” it is also about everything that makes an adult life so difficult. Death, loss, loneliness, alcoholism, religious fundamentalism, homophobia, illness and physical decay. Heavy substances, even for an adult audience, certainly too much for smaller children. But even adult spectators are likely to fight tears regularly in the course of Gracies in a literary form as an off-monologous, tragic life story. Because if you don't shed a secret tear in the darkness of the cinema with “memoirs of a snail”, for Gracie and Gilbert and her difficult fate, you probably have a heart from plasticine.
Conclusion: The second movie from Adam Elliot, animated in eight years by stop-motion technology, is one of the most moving films of the year, to burst with sadness and melancholic beauty. For a child's audience, “memoirs of a snail” are certainly too melancholy and grown up in emotional terms. You can't recommend this wonderful, deeply touching film to everyone else.