Memoir of a Snail: Animator’s Fingertip in a Jar
The meticulous work of a stop-motion animator is well known for its delicately handcrafted detail and animagic. But for the Academy Award-winning Australian animator Adam Elliot’s 2024 feature film, Memoir of a Snail, one detail is more personal and fairly grotesque. In a past interview with Cartoonbrew.com at the first screening in Accecy, Elliot revealed that a jar appearing in multiple scenes of the film contains a very real piece of human anatomy: the severed fingertip of one of his animators.
The story involves Elliot’s second cousin, Donna Yeatman, a very talented but “a little bit clumsy” member of the claymation crew. “She wasn’t as experienced as the other members of the crew,” Elliot recounted. “She was always stabbing herself, or cutting herself, and one day she chopped off the top of her finger and it bounced off the workbench, and we couldn’t find it.”
The missing fingertip embarked on a short journey. “A week later, while cleaning the studio, we found the piece, but it was too late to sew it back,” Elliot said. Rather than getting rid of it, the team chose for a unique cinematic form of preservation. “So we put it in a little jar; it appears several times on screen, and there’s a tiny piece of human body in the film.”
For viewers now eager to spot the unusual easter egg, two locations have been confirmed. In response to a follow-up question I was morbid enough to ask, Elliot’s assistant Dan provided an answer, “Hi there ……. Can’t give you timecode but it appears in the opening montage near the bathtub bottom right of screen and then the panning shots of the hoard in Grace’s bedroom. It’s in a clear cylindrical jar …. Hard to spot but definitely the small tip of a finger!”
In Memoir of a Snail, a film about the things we collect and carry with us, the team literally preserved a piece of themselves, ensuring that Donna Yeatman’s contribution and their sacrifice is forever etched into the film.
About The Author
