Memoir of a Snail (2024)

This is an animated movie, but think more Life Of A Zucchini than something more silly and Happily Ever After. This is the story of two children, twins named Grace and Gilbert, but if is by no means a story for kids. Grace, who is telling her life story to her favorite pet snail, Sylvia, after the death of the last person on Earth she cared about, her best friend Pinky (a wonderful Jacki Weaver). It’s a story of notable hardship. Mom died in childbirth. Dad was a paraplegic who didn’t live long enough to raise Grace or her twin brother Gilbert (voiced by Kodi Smit-McPhee in adulthood). The twins were split after Dad passed, sending Grace to a pair of swingers—yes, this is a shockingly adult stop-motion movie, likely setting a new record for nudity in the form—and Gilbert to a family of religious fundamentalists on the other side of the country who use and abuse him. Much of the movie consists of letters sent back and forth between Grace and Gilbert, vowing to return to each other as soon as they can escape the shells that life has placed on them.