With “The Princess and the Frog” winning rave reviews and “Fantastic Mr. Fox” popping up on 10-best lists, it’s time to lobby for “Mary and Max,” one of the strangest, funniest films of the year and an oddity that stands out in what has been a good year for animated features.
Made in Australia by Adam Elliot, who won an Oscar for his short film “Harvie Krumpet” six years ago, “Mary and Max” is a twisted claymation film defiantly not for kids. Mary (voiced by Toni Collette) is a lonely eight-year-old girl from the Melbourne suburbs with an alcoholic mother and classmates who bully her; Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is her inadvertent pen pal from New York City, a overweight Jewish man with Asperger’s Syndrome and a yen for chocolate hot dogs, a recipe of his own invention. Their unlikely friendship is brilliantly weird and very funny, with remarkable vocal performances from Hoffman, Collette and narrator Barry Humphries, among others. (The film is now available on Video-on-Demand through IFC.)
When I mentioned “Mary and Max” to “Coraline” director Henry Selick, his reaction was immediate: “It’s a stupendously powerful movie, and Adam is a pioneer.” But the 37-year-old Elliot prefers to keep Hollywood at arm's length, he said in a recent conversation.
There’s a title card at the beginning of your film says “Based on a true story.” How true can it be?
All my films have been based on my family and friends and the people around me, but until this film I’ve never actually put that card at the beginning of the film. But this one is almost a documentary. I do have a pen friend in New York who I’ve been writing to for more than 20 years. He does have Asperger's, he is a big man, he is Jewish, he is an atheist.
And Mary … Well, I suppose Mary is me. Her environment was very similar to my own childhood experience. My father’s name is Noel, but he didn’t work in a teabag factory and he didn’t die by being drowned by a tidal wave. So it’s a blend. I always use the expression "don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story."
So Mary’s feelings of being an outsider come from you?
Oh sure. I think everybody’s gone though that kind of loneliness. But for me, particularly, I’ve always felt like I don’t fit into any particular social group. Even now, as a filmmaker, I feel like I’m on the fringes. Especially because I live closer to Antarctica than any other continent. I don’t belong to America, I don’t belong to Europe, I’m this person in Australia making these claymation films, which no one else is doing down here.
After you won the Oscar for “Harvie Krumpet,” I would imagine that if you wanted to come over here, go to lunch with John Lasseter and become a part of the animation community, you could have.
