Sundance Opener: Mary and Max
In keeping with its line-up of offbeat films Sundance Film Festival announced that Australian claymation film Mary and Max will inaugurate its silver jubilee year.
Director Adam Elliot is not new to such recognition. In 2004 he won an Oscar for the Best Short Feature for Harvie Krumpet, a claymation short.
Claymation is a portmanteau of the words ‘clay’ and ‘animation’. It has been around since 1978 when Will Vinton, a clay animator, registered the word claymation as a trademark for the animated features his studio created. Clay animation is kind of animation used in the popular Wallace and Gromit shorts, in the 2000 film Chicken Run. It is also used extensively in Seth Green and Matthew Senreich’s sketch comedy Robot Chicken. Any animation that makes use of plasticene or anything similar to plasticene can be categorized as claymation.
Mary and Max is a story of the friendship between a lonely eight year old girl in Melbourne, Mary Dinkle, and an overweight fourty-four year old New Yorker, Max Horovitz, who suffers from Asperger’s Syndrome. How do they interact? Through written words - they’re penpals.
Multifaceted American actor Philip Seymour Hoffman lends his voice to Max, while Australian arthouse queen Toni Collete voices Mary’s character. Eric Bana too has a role in voicing one of the films characters. The movie, if not for the hype surrounding the opening night, could have gone unnoticed. Now that’s what Sundance is all about: art over all else.
The 25th Sundance Film Festival will take place in Park City, Utah from January 15th - 25th. The rest of the Sundance line-up will be announced in the first week of December.
