Exactly 20 years after stop-motion animator Adam Elliot won his first Oscar for Harvey Krumpet, he has finally delivered on an eight-year project with a story about growing up in 1970s Australia, Memoir of a Snail.

Making its world premiere in competition at the prestigious Annecy International Animation Film Festival in south-eastern France, Elliot, 52, said the group of Hollywood A-list stars he approached to voice his main claymation characters all had one thing in common.

Succession‘s Sarah Snook, The Dry‘s Eric Bana, Jacki Weaver (currently in Yellowstone), Kodi Smit-McPhee (Year of the Dog), Magda Szubanski (Ride Like a Girl) and the ABC’s Tony Armstrong are all from Melbourne.

“Sarah just lives down the road. They’re all locals. They all know my work and that it’s low budget before we even approach them,” he told Deadline in an interview on the sidelines of the festival this week.

Elliot says the film, like his 2009 offering Mary and Max, is not designed as children’s entertainment.

“I wanted to tell biographies about my family and friends, and they all had afflictions and problems … I also wanted to make comedies.

“I think there’s that mindset when you see these cute, particularly plasticine characters, which we all identify with because we all played with Play-Doh.

“Then to suddenly see something challenging and confronting … I do love to manipulate the audience and push those boundaries.

“And make people feel uncomfortable at times, but it’s knowing when to stop.”

‘Visual story teller’

Snook plays Grace Pudle, the female protagonist who finds comfort in hoarding snail memorabilia and books after a life punctuated by emotional setbacks.

The story goes that at a young age, when Grace is separated from her fire-breathing twin brother Gilbert (Smit-McPhee), she falls into a spiral of anxiety and angst.

Despite a continued series of hardships, inspiration and hope emerge when she strikes up an enduring friendship with an elderly eccentric woman named Pinky (Weaver), who is full of grit and lust for life.

Elliot says he had Snook in mind for the role of Grace early on, even before her hugely successful run on Succession.

“Sarah’s quite self-deprecating and humble and very down to earth. And that’s sort of what Grace is.”

Singer, songwriter and poet, Nick Cave, also makes a cameo. Photo: Madman Entertainment

‘Clayography’

Early reviews from the festival say Elliot is a “master of the art of gallows humour’’ and ‘clayography’ – the term coined by Elliot for his distinctive stop-motion biographical stories.

It is a film as hilarious as it is heart-wrenching, often within the same scene, according to ScreenDaily.

Elliot reveals Grace is based on two real-life characters – his mother, who is a reformed hoarder, and his friend, Annalise, who has had 11 operations on a cleft palate.

“[His mother] was never a hoarder in the sense of being unhygienic. It wasn’t filled to the ceiling, but it was an issue.

“I became fascinated by how people get into this situation. What is the root cause. Then I started watching all those horrible, exploitive documentaries on hoarders. They’re all quite cruel. The more research I did and the more I read, the more realised it was to do with trauma.”

Aussies stars have assembled for the stop-motion film. Photo: Getty/TND

He says Annalise is now “gregarious and the life of the party, but as a child, she was the complete opposite, introverted and bullied at school”.

There’s also a lot of Elliot in the story as well: “The Gilbert character is essentially me”.

In the story, Gilbert ends up being placed with an ultra-conservative, religious cult-like family but it’s not something he had experienced in real life.

“No, no, not but I had friends who were subjected to gay conversion therapy. But it’s not all based on fact … Pinky is a very fictional character.

“I always knew that I wanted to make a film about an eccentric old woman at some point.”

Memoir of a Snail will make its Australian debut at the Melbourne International Film Festival on August 8