A whimsical Australian stop-motion film about separated twins has taken the top prize at the London film festival, with the jury calling it a “singular achievement in film-making”.
The Oscar-winning director Adam Elliot’s Memoir of a Snail won the best film award, the first time a stop-motion animation has been awarded the top prize.
Other contenders included Christopher Andrews’ debut Bring Them Down, which starred Christopher Abbott and Barry Keoghan, and The Extraordinary Miss Flower by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, the team behind 20,000 Days on Earth.
The official competition jury, which included the documentary film-maker Alexandre O Philippe and June Givanni, said: “Emotionally resonant and constantly surprising, Memoir tackles 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.”
Elliot said: “To win best film among such incredible films from around the world shows that stop-motion animation is alive and well and is not a genre but a wonderful medium and vehicle to tell potent and universal stories that can make audiences both laugh and cry.”
Elliot first rose to prominence when he won an Oscar for his 2003 film Harvie Krumpet, “a Candide-like tale of a man struck in turn by Tourette’s, lightning, a cancerous testicle and Alzheimer’s”, which he followed with 2009’s Mary and Max, voiced by Toni Colette.
Memoir of a Snail attracted more A-list talent, with Succession’s Sarah Snook lending her voice to the main character: Grace Pudel, a lonely middle-aged woman who is “a reclusive hoarder, surrounded by chaos and snail memorabilia”.
The Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw said there was “an ingenuousness and innocence to Memoir of a Snail, a family-entertainment approachability that belies a strange intensity”, while adding that Elliot had a knack for “creating a distinctive kind of lovability and pathos and importantly an instinct for the underdog and the outsider”.
Elliot told the Guardian that Memoir of a Snail came after a decade-long process of soul-searching. “I went through a period of despondency and then depression because Mary and Max was so difficult … to finance and get made,” he said.
Other winners included On Falling by Laura Carreira, which won the Sutherland award for first feature; Mother Vera by Cécile Embleton and Alys Tomlinson won the Grierson award for best documentary, and the short film award went to Vibrations from Gaza by Rehab Nazzal.
