Like much of the film, this information is relayed by the narrator, Barry Humphries, in the straight-up manner Elliot's characters often use: “To Mary, Vera always seemed wobbly. Teased at school, Mary sports a birthmark "the colour of poo”, lives a lower-middle class existence in a quiet neighbourhood and has a kleptomaniac alcoholic for a mother. Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Bethany Whitmore as a child and Toni Collette as an adult) begins the film as a lonely eight-year-old girl living in Mount Waverley who writes a letter to a socially reclusive New York man, Max (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) after randomly finding his postal address in an American phone book. Like all Elliot’s work, Mary and Max is vaguely autobiographical, inspired by a real-life pen pal relationship he started more than 25 years ago. "They worked out if I had animated it, it would have taken 225 years." " It was a logistical nightmare," he said in 2009. Elliot employed six animators who each completed roughly five seconds a day. The crew constructed 133 sets, 212 puppets and 475 props. If Elliot built the foundation of his career by playing in the proverbial sandbox, at home fiddling with clumps of clay, Mary and Max took his craft to a new level. In tone, aesthetic and narrative it is an extension of his prior work but writ large. Mary and Max, which opened the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, is Elliot's only feature film. Like all Elliot’s work, it deftly mixes humour and pathos and imbues simple-looking surfaces with complex emotions. The protagonist is struck by lightning, loses a testicle, loses his wife and grapples with Tourette's syndrome, but the film isn't a downer.
An analogue artist plying his trade in a digital era, Elliot's painstaking art – hands-on in a literal sense – is a rare treat for audiences accustomed to computer effects and CGI fakery.įinessing his aesthetic in a trio of poignant short films (1996's Uncle, 1999's Cousin and 2000's Brother) Elliot received international recognition and an Academy Award for Harvey Krumpet (2009), a 22-minute story of a Polish immigrant who comes to Australia and experiences a series of horrible mishaps.
Sculpted with bulging eyes, wobbly lines and clumpy figures, Elliot's characters look haunted but cute, as if Ralph Steadman got his hands on the cast of Gumby. The 42-year-old claymation artist's unique homemade-looking style is present in virtually any shot of any of his creations from any of his films. The stop-motion animation of the Australian writer/director/designer Adam Elliot is nothing if not distinctive.