Adam, Mary and Max

Richard Watts chats with Australian animator Adam Elliot about his new feature film.

In many ways, Adam Elliot sees his debut feature film, Mary and Max, as a coming out movie.

“Mary’s a mary,” Elliot laughs over lunch at the Abbotsford Convent. “I’ve done a lot of interviews with different gay and lesbian mags and blogs and whatever, and I’ve been really relieved and reassured – because I thought they were just going to focus on [the character of] poor, old Damien Popodopolous, a stereotypical gay character – I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to hate me.’ But they actually ignored me in a way and they’ve actually seen Mary’s story as a gay story.

“She sees herself as different, and not fitting in, and marginalised and melancholic and suicidal and all these things that all people go through, but especially gay and lesbian people.”

The bleak but beautiful Mary and Max – a feature length stop-motion animation made in the “wonky” style of Elliot’s 2003 Oscar-award winning short Harvie Krumpet – is the story of an unlikely friendship between Mary Dinkle, a lonely young Australian, and her penfriend Max Horovitz, an obese, middle-aged New Yorker who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome.

“There’s all sorts of themes I’ve tried to cram in there. I suppose there’s no moral to the film but there’s a message about self-acceptance, acceptance of others, acceptance of difference,” Elliot says. “The overall story itself is supporting positive human values.”

The film’s uplifting message is hidden behind a fairly grim veneer, reflecting the dull, beige suburbia of Elliot’s childhood. It deliberately shies away from the bright, cute tone most people associate with animated movies. The characters are flawed, and the story itself explores some fairly dark territory, because for Elliot, comedy and tragedy are essential parts of the same story.

“I said to someone the other day, and this is probably a stupid analogy, do you remember Sizzlers restaurants? I used to go in there with my Uncle John, he loved Sizzler, and he would try and get everything on his plate … and it’s the same with my films. I try and get as much in there as possible; so I will have scenes about suicide and I’ll have really base comedy, toilet gags and poo gags.

“I tried to make a film that I would want to go and see. It has to have a bit of everything, but somehow still be cohesive and still make sense and have some potency.”

While he admits it can be “dangerous trying to make a film like that; it can be muddled and messy and a dog’s breakfast,” Elliot also recognises that such mess is a key element of his cinematic language.

“Everything – the characters are flawed, and the characters are imperfect – everything got a slightly wonky edge. We had a rule with every prop that was made, whether it was a toaster or a broomstick or whatever, that it had to look like it had been dropped once, or bought at an op shop, so that everything in the film had this flavour of being imperfect or flawed, and that represented Mary and Max themselves. We didn’t want to be slick.”

Unlike his earlier short films, which Elliot wrote and animated himself, Mary and Max allowed him to employ a team of animators to help bring his vision to life.

"I tried to employ only artists, not technicians. For example, Gavin Brown did our skies, and we employed sculptors to make the original puppets, and jewellery makers to do the armatures. There was a temptation to use digital effects, like digital smoke and rain and fire, but we chose to employ only animators who were traditionalists and did things the expensive, slow way. And of course because we had these budget constraints – we only had $8 million dollars – only – but Aardman have $80 million – there was the temptation to do a lot of blue- and green-screen and stuff like that, but we kept that to an absolute minimum. It’s handcrafted.”

Mary and Max is now screening nationally.