“Snail in the Clouds – A Film for Songs” is a uniquely inventive animated film by Michele Ducci and Letizia Mandolesi, populated by a world of fascinating and loveable creatures. It serves as a companion piece to the album “Snail in the Clouds”, which was released this month (June 2026) via Monotreme Records.
Skillfully hand-drawn by Letizia Mandolesi, written by Michele Ducci, music produced by Simon Milner, Michele Ducci and Letizia Mandolesi. Mastered by Giovanni Versari. Original music/story by Michele Ducci.
The plot of the film centres on a dream about a planet, experienced by a sleeping airplane passenger during turbulence. It serves as a variation on Plato’s “Allegory of the Cave” and a study on clouds and turbulence – much like the upheaval brought by the arrival of alphabetic language and the Sophists in ancient Greece, long before the AI Cloud.
The dream is about a planet called Snail, inhabited by hybrids – primarily a mixture between scorpions, snails and humans – who lead a life according to the style of Pythagoras, devoted to music.
There is also a cloud man named Agostos, a writer of musical operettas, who together with a talking smoke machine called Doctor Subtilis, begins to kill all hybrids, targeting in particular the hybrid musician Diodoros and his band, in an effort to steal the Ark of Melodies, an ancient ship that allows the whole planet to survive with music and joy.
Drawing on influences including Brecht, Godard, Kafka, Dragon Ball, Il Candelaio by Giordano Bruno, Carmelo Bene and La rana e lo scorpione by Rocco Ronchi (to whom the film is dedicated).
The film was created, according to Michel Ducci: “To invent a world that tells us what ours is like. Creating a monad: a mix between a film animation, a music album, and a philosophical operetta on the Pythagoreans that unites all artistic media in a single matriosque, using video clips as the songs are used in the Brechtian theatre read in an art pop key.”
- A limited edition vinyl pressing of 200 copies of “Snail in the Clouds” will be released in July, which can pre-ordered from The Monotreme Records shop or from Bandcamp.
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