Sarah Snook

Memoir of a Snail

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Grace in her snail hat

“It doesn’t all have to be Disney,” is animator Adam Elliot’s rallying cry. And in Memoir of a Snail, with jokes about masturbation and death, paedophilia, arson and murder, he proves it. It’s refreshing and yet oddly familiar, as if Wallace and Gromit had been given a wipe down with a mucky cloth. But cute is the overriding impression, from the old-school ragged-edged stop-motion animation – Wallace and Gromit before Nick Park got the big bucks – to the characters on display. The “snail” is actually a girl in a snail hat called Grace, one of two twins with her brother Gilbert, born with a cleft lip to a mother who died in … Read more

The Beanie Bubble

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Robbie and Ty step out in pink

The story behind the success of a stuffed-toy phenomenon, The Beanie Bubble is in many ways a template World 2.0 tale of one man, a vision, plus a lot of help from other people, most of whom get left in the dust when it is time to bask in the glory. It could be Jobs, or Musk, or Thiel, or Bezos, but here it’s Ty Warner – in many ways he got there first, building up a company selling understuffed, very soft toys to children. The toys became a thing, a can’t-lose investment. Starting in the 1980s but accelerating to warp speed in the 1990s, Ty Inc. rose and rose on the back … Read more

An American Pickle

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Seth Rogen as Ben and Herschel

American Pickle is unsure whether it’s fighting the culture war or fighting it off – a proper pickle It’s amusing, likeable, good-natured and I really wanted to like it, but American Pickle really is all over the place. Basics first: Seth Rogen is the East European from some Yiddish-speaking stetl who, after the Cossacks kill everyone in his village in a pogrom, heads to the US with his wife and love of his life (Sarah Snook, soon dead, before you get too excited). There, Herschel gets a job, falls into a vat in a pickle factory, wakes up a century later, the brine having somehow magically preserved him, and heads out into modern New … Read more