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Mary and Max

Out of Australia comes a brilliant movie about diversity, difference, and friendship.  “Mary and Max”, a multiple award winning  film directed by Victoria’s  Adam Elliot and produced by Melanie Coombs has just been released on DVD. The story, told through claymation, shows the progression of a friendship as it develops through writing letters over a number of years.  This film will make you laugh and cry, all at the same time.  You will leave the theatre or your lounge seat fully challenged, and totally satisfied. 

Mary Dinkle, a chubby lonely eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max Horovitz, a 44-year-old, severely obese, Jewish man with Asperger’s Syndrome living in the chaos of New York, strike up an extraordinary bond.  Spanning twenty years and two continents, Mary and Max’s friendship survives much more than the average diet of life’s ups and downs.  All the characters in this movie are drawn with depth and display a range of real human experience, strengths, and weaknesses.   The film stars Philip Seymour Hoffman (Doubt, The Boat That Rocked), Toni Collette (The Black Balloon, TV’s United States of Tara), Barry Humphries (Dame Edna) and Eric Bana (Star Trek. The Other Boleyn Girl).

Writer/Director Adam Elliot’s previous short films, Harvie Krumpet, Uncle, Cousin, and Brother are amongst the most successful short films made in Australia.  They have won 5 Australian Film Institute awards, as well as many international awards including the Oscar.  The shorts continue to screen at festivals around the world, on the internet at http://www.atomfilms.com and on various DVD compilations, where they continue to entertain and move audiences.

Divine reports that 37-year-old Elliot says he is fascinated by human nature. “I’m also fascinated by the crazy idea that we are all striving for perfection… Everyone has a flaw that they may not want, that some people embrace, some people ignore, some people try and cure it, some people label it as a disability, some people label it as an advantage.”

Elliot says he “gets annoyed when people say I make films about disability”. “I just make films about people around me. Basically what I’m saying is that everybody is unusual and that everybody is unique and everybody has imperfection. It’s all about perception and how you can forgive yourself and others.”

Mum

 Read more about Elliot here

Academy Award ® winner Adam Elliot is one of the worlds most celebrated and critically acclaimed independent filmmakers. His five animated works have been viewed by millions of people and have participated in over five-hundred film festivals. In 2009 “Mary and Max” was invited to open Robert Redford’s Sundance Film Festival – the first Australian and first Animated film to ever do so. His films have received over one hundred awards, including an Oscar ® in 2004 for “Harvie Krumpet”. His production company, “Adam Elliot Pictures”, create unique and bittersweet animations, or as Adam calls them ‘Clayographies’ – clay animated biographies.

 Written and directed solely by Adam, his highly skilled team of animators and modelmakers spend thousands of painstaking hours bringing his comic and poignant cinematic stories to life. Costing millions of dollars and taking years to complete, his team use traditional ‘in-camera’ techniques, which means every prop set and character is a ‘real’ miniature handcrafted object. Based on the people around him, his universal stories are personal and unique biographies that deal with themes from the achingly funny to the darkly melancholic. Viewed by people of all ages, his stories have entertained and nourished people in nearly every country on earth. His scripts attract and are voiced by some of the worlds finest actors including, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Toni Collette, Geoffrey Rush, Eric Bana and Barry Humphries.

 Born upside down and back to front in 1972, Adam was raised in the Australian Outback on a shrimp farm with his father – a retired acrobatic clown, his mother – a hairdresser, three siblings and two parrots called Sunny and Cher. After the farm went bankrupt, Adam’s father moved the family back to the city of Melbourne, where he bought a hardware shop and tried to blend in. Adam was a very shy child and loved to lock himself in his bedroom, spending hours drawing and making things out of egg-cartons and toilet-roll tubes. Despite being sent to a private boy’s school where he excelled at Art, English-literature, Photography, Drawing and Sculpture, Adam failed dismally in all the ‘important’ subjects like Maths, Science, Religious Studies and anything to do with throwing a balls. Due to his poor grades, his lifelong ambition to become a famous veterinarian has never been fulfilled.

 In extra curriculum activities Adam flourished and was a keen member of the school’s Highland Pipe Band where got over his shyness by playing the Bass-drum and wearing an antique taxidermic lion robe. He also enjoyed acting and wearing skivvies. In his final year he was awarded the school’s highest honour, The A.G. Greenwood Trophy for an outstanding dramatic performance as Dr. Watson in the Sherlock Holmes play “The Incredible Murder of Cardinal Tosca”. Despite the usual teenage ups and downs, Adam continued to draw and make things. Born with a physiological tremor, his shakiness never got in the way and was incorporated into a unique and quirky aesthetic. Today this has become famously known as the ‘chunky-wonky’ style. Upon leaving school, and to his parents dismay, Adam spent five years hand-painting teeshirts at a local craft market. His most popular design was ‘Murray the tap-dancing Dim-Sim’, which he put in pizza-boxes and sold for an overinflated price. In 1996 he became bored and decided to study animation at The Victorian College of the Arts. There he made his first stopmotion film, “Uncle”, which surprised everyone by becoming a worldwide hit. He suddenly realised he liked filmmaking and has since dedicated himself to the artform, producing four more films, “Cousin”, “Brother”, “Harvie Krumpet” and “Mary and Max”.

 To everyones surprise Adam was recently announced as an Australia National Treasure! In 1999 he was made Young Victorian of the Year and is the official patron of  “The Other Film Festival”, new cinema by, with and about people with a disability. He is a voting member for the Annual Academy Awards and in 2003 the Annecy International Animation Festival included “Harvie Krumpet” as one of the top 100 animated films of all time. In demand as an international corporate speaker Adam has told his inspiring and motivating life-story to hundreds of groups around the world; from huge multinationals to his local library. He lives his life by the famous quote, “that life can only be understood backwards but we have to live it forwards” and via his website thousands of copies of his dvds as well as his quirky and original artwork have been acquired by fans around the globe.

 He is currently writing his new feature animation, and in between cups of Earl-grey tea, goblets of pretentious French merlot and bouts of Rachmaninov on his piano, he enjoys antique shopping, cooking Tessa Kiros feasts, reading the classics and walking his two pugs, Barry and Kevin.

 October 2009