The Odd Couple
An obese, middle-aged man with a love of chocolate hotdogs and a little girl who makes necklaces out of potato chip bags find common ground in the claymated Mary and Max.
"A lot of animated films today are absolutely not for kids but they're incredibly powerful. And that's why I think more independent filmmakers are turning toward animation." -Melanie Coombs
There are animated films that you take the kids to see and then there are animated films best appreciated by grown-ups. Mary and Max, the opening-night selection of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, definitely falls into the latter category. This moody claymation movie embraces the dark side of human nature, tackling issues of loneliness, alcoholism, suicide, and morbid obesity.
Mary and Max deals with depressing themes but it's not a depressing movie. In fact, it's a comedy (of sorts) with a life-affirming message. Five years in the making, Mary and Max is the first feature by Australian writer-director Adam Elliot, who won an Academy Award in 2004 for his animated short film Harvie Krumpet.
His new movie tells the story of two oddball pen pals -- Max (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman), a 44-year-old obese New Yorker who lives alone, and Mary (voiced as a child by Bethany Whitmore and later by Toni Collette), a friendless eight-year-old girl living in Australia.
Speaking during a break in post-production from a studio in Melbourne, the director explained that the movie is based on his own long-distance pen-friendship with an obese Jewish man in New York who suffers from autism. "I can't reveal his name, of course," says Elliot, 36. "But I suppose I'm Mary in our situation."
During production, the filmmaker wanted Hoffman to use an unrecognizable voice as Max because he feared the audience's illusion "will be spoiled if you can picture the actor in a sound studio." At first, Hoffman used an autistic-like voice but the director thought it was too cold. The actor then tried a gruff Noo-Yawk accent that the director thought was warmer. (Hoffman recorded his part in London while the crew worked in Melbourne; they collaborated via Skype video.)
Mary and Max follows the protagonists' friendship for nearly 20 years as they grow older and somehow keep missing opportunities to meet each other in person. Mary's self-esteem improves and she eventually befriends Damien (Eric Bana), an artistically inclined boy with a stutter. Meanwhile, Max grows fatter and more reclusive.
The director said his main visual inspiration was Diane Arbus, whose photographs often depict social outcasts and the physically grotesque. In the movie's first shot of the Manhattan skyline, Elliot inserted a fleeting homage to Arbus in the form of a woman who resembles the famed photographer standing at a window.
Shooting Mary and Max using the stop-motion process took a little more than 13 months, with an average of 2.5 minutes of animation created per week. The crew made 212 plasticene puppets and used six hi-res Canon digital still cameras to capture the tiny changes in positioning needed to create the illusion of movement.
In all, the film cost under $10 million, with the majority of the budget coming from the Australian government. Melanie Coombs, the film's producer, said the Oscar win for Harvie Krumpet helped to open doors. "Quite frankly, people returned our calls faster," she says. "But it wasn't easy by any stretch of the imagination. We rubbed every cent twice."
She adds that the success of mature-themed animated movies like Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir has made the art form more attractive to indie filmmakers: "You can tell a story in the animated world that people would find too confronting in a live-action movie. A lot of animated films today are absolutely not for kids but they're incredibly powerful. And that's why I think more independent filmmakers are turning toward animation."
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