Its been five years since writer/director, Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs, shot to fame winning an Oscar for the short-film Harvey Krumpet, but they are finally back with their first feature-length animated film, Mary and Max.
Mary is a lonely eight-year-old girl with a ‘birthmark the colour of poo’ and an alcoholic mother living in suburban Melbourne, while Max is an obese, Jewish man with Asperger’s syndrome who lives in New York. The two form an unlikely friendship over 20 years of letter-writing, chocolate bars and sweetened condensed milk.
The film features some well-known voices, with Toni Collette as Mary, Phillip Seymour Hoffman as Max, Eric Bana as Damian Popodopolous and the legendary Barry Humphries as the narrator.
As with Harvey Krumpet, Mary and Max deals with themes of difference and acceptance and is not afraid to tackle what could be considered sensitive topics: taxidermy, kleptomania, obesity and mental illness, just to name a few.
Adam Elliot says these themes resonate with people because they are common to the human experience.
‘The underdog, the outsider, different, marginalised- I think we’ve all been through those stages. I don’t think anyone can ever deny being lonely or feeling different.
I always say that my characters are archetypal, they’re universal. It’s the archetypal looser or the archetypal underdog, so these characters, they resonate with people from all over the world, from all different ages and races.’
While Elliot may be an openly gay man, his longtime collaborator and producer, Melanie Coombs says the film has a wider appeal than just the GLBTIQ community.
‘I really do think that it’s absolutely something that gay and lesbian people can relate to, but I can relate to it too and I’m not gay. I think that sense of feeling isolated, alone and an outsider is actually the commonest experience. In fact I don’t know anyone who identifies otherwise. Who feels like they absolutely are completely normal?’ she said.
Max and Mary is only the second stop motion feature film ever to be made in Australia and is the biggest project tackled by Elliot and Coombs so far. A production crew of 50 people, complete with art department, camera crew, animators and assistants was a welcome change for Elliot, who did most of the work on Harvey Krumpet himself.
‘Harvey was basically Mel, myself, we had a sound designer and an editor at the end and during the production I had two part-time assistants, but never there at the same time. So, it was essentially a lonely experience, whereas this experience was anything but lonely, there were days when I wished I could be lonely. We had a huge building- 700 square metres, we had an art department that was at times up to 30 people, we had 10 camera crew, 6 animators, animation assistants, digital artists upstairs… so the challenge was to try to get all these people, especially the creative ones to make this film look like I had done it all myself. To keep that personal touch and to make the characters look like my drawings. So I designed all the characters on paper and then the sculptors tried to sculpt them in my style.’
As self-confessed people-pleasers, Elliot and Coombs said it was a challenge learning how to stand up for themselves and instruct others on their vision.
‘It was the first time Adam had to learn how to actually tell someone what he wanted, instead of just doing it. He had to learn how to be a director and actually go ‘no no, I want it like this’ and being ok with doing that. We’ve both learnt an enormous amount on that level- of accepting big responsibility. For me, it was the biggest budget I’ve ever dealt with up until this point and trust me, that was stressful,’ said Coombs.
Digital technology may have helped speed up the process of stop motion filmmaking but Elliot is hesitant to cut too many corners as he wants his work to keep an authentic feel.
‘My aim was to do the film in a traditional way. The aim is to not make it look CGI. Some stop motion films, like Aardman’s, are so slick now they don’t look like stop motion animation.’
Doing things the ‘traditional’ way leads to some painstaking, intricate work such as constructing 808 miniature Earl Grey tea boxes and 38 miniature (and fully functioning) light globes.
Other interesting numbers from the production of Mary and Max include, 73 kilograms of plasticine used to make over 1026 mouths, hands and original sculpts of the characters, and 12 litres of lube.
Apparently, water based sexual lubricant is ideal for creating water effects in stop motion animation.
‘Lube has this amazing property, it doesn’t evaporate. It takes years apparently- if you put a blob of lube there, you could actually come back a week later and it will still be there. Everything in animation has to be rigid, so we’ve used different stuff like glycerin we’ve tried and that’s good for sweat, but not good for tears. There are all sorts of clear substances we use, but primarily lube is all of the oceans, rivers, it’s used for all sorts of things,’ said Elliot.
Mary and Max is showing at selected Luna Cinemas.
Amy Henderson
