Harvie Krumpet: The father of Mary and Max

Director: Adam Elliot
Year: 2003

Following the previous posts about the stellar "Mary and Max," I was moved to check out this short film by the same director, Adam Elliott. And after watching 2003's Oscar-winning "Harvie Krumpet," it's clear to see what the links between it and the latter film.

"Krumpet" tells the story of a man with Tourette Syndrome. Born in Poland, Harvie emigrates to Australia after the death of both parents. His life is fraught with bad luck--one accident leaves him with a metal plate in his head that attracts all manner of objects. But there's joy too--Harvie marries and he and his wife adopt a daughter who grows up to be a superb student and later a lawyer. Along the way, we watch as Harvie finds himself--becoming a nudist and a champion of animal rights--all the while writing down "fakts" which he keeps in a small book hung around his neck.

It's odd, charming, sad and funny all at the same time--just like "Mary and Max." Some of the same set pieces appear in both films, expanded and refined in the latter movie. But six years before he unleashed his masterpiece on the world, Elliott had already come up with the blueprint in a strange, kind and ultimately wonderful man.

Interview with Adam Elliot

Here's an interview with Adam Elliot, originally conducted by Luke Buckmaster at the blog, Cinetology. Note to self--track down the short films!

Adam Elliot’s animated short films Uncle, Cousin, Brother and Harvie Krumpet have participated in over five hundred film festivals and garnered countless accolades. In 2004 his name shot to international recognition when Harvey Krumpet won an Oscar for Best Animated Short Film. Elliot’s follow-up project is his full length feature debut Mary and Max, a painstakingly crafted picture that this year became the first Australian film selected to open America’s prestigious Sundance Film Festival. In the lead-up to the film’s Oz release (Mary and Max opened in Australia this week) Elliot sat down for a yak with Cinetology.

With all these publicists buzzing around and all these photographers taking pictures, it’s very clear that you’re the man of the hour. Most of the animators and designers I’ve met, however, say they prefer to stay behind the lens and away from the spotlight. Is this true for you?

I think so. My brother is an actor and he always wants to be in front of the camera. I’m always happy to be behind the camera and I think it’s in our nature. I’ve always been a bit shy but since the Oscar I‘ve had to learn how to be interviewed and I now do corporate speaking. Every week I get up in front of thousands of people and talk, so I don’t really have a choice.

Around the time of your Oscar success with Harvey Krumpet your name must have spread very quickly through Hollywood. You mentioned you’re a shy person, so what’s your relationship like with ‘the scene’ over there? Do you ever go to the parties and mingle with the celebrities?

I get two tickets to the Oscars every year but I haven’t been back to be honest. We keep our distance. After Harvey Krumpet we were getting offers there but they were all about directing other people’s work and other people’s scripts. I’m such a control freak I thought no – I really just want to make another one of my films and I’d really like to do it back in St Kilda in Melbourne. I’d really like to employ my friends. It took awhile for me to realise all that. It’s all about creative control. Over there, yes, I’d get paid more money and all the rest but I would relinquish a lot of control.

I read on the internet – so I assume it just has to be true – that after Harvey Krumpet you were offered a deal from Pixar for a sequel to Monsters Inc or Finding Nemo.

That one is probably not true, no. What we were offered was a first look at a deal with Elton John’s company, Rocket Man Pictures, and it was a concept for a CGI feature animation called Gnomio and Juliette, which was about garden gnomes that fall in love. Well, we didn’t even read the script. We thought it sounded like we would be going down the wrong path. It was computer animation anyway and I have no knowledge of computer animation. It is as foreign to me as, I don’t know, tap dancing, but the offer was lucrative (and) the money would have been great. We went to Pixar and Dreamworks and we pitched different ideas but they just looked at us blankly and thought ‘they’re too strange for us.’ My ideas are really…not Hollywood. They’re much more European, I suppose. More sophisticated. But then it was great to get into Sundance and go back there and sort of say ‘well you should have invested in us, because we went and made it anyway and now we’re opening night at your festival.’

I have a cupboard full of AFI awards and trophies and things and I look at them and I think well that’s great, but why am I as poor as I was 12 years ago when I started all this? I don’t own my films and the investors get all their money before I do. What I really want for Mary and Max is plain and simple: I just want as many people as possible to see it. I couldn’t care less if I never win another award. I am more than happy not to win another Oscar – one is enough – but I would just love people to go and see it and that’s the toughest bit, getting people to pay $15 to see it. We’ll never have the success of Shrek or Nemo or those big blockbusters, but we’ll see what happens.

I was intrigued to read that Mary and Max was inspired by your own pen pal relationship. Can you tell me a little bit more about this relationship and what sort of impression it’s had on your life?

Well, my pen friend I have been writing to for over 20 years lives in New York. Like Max he is an atheist, he is Jewish and he has Asperger’s. There are a lot similarities but the film is not based on his life. I say it’s inspired by him. I never let the truth get in the way of a good story and there are plenty of embellishments. Mary of course is far more fictitious but I suppose I am Mary, because I was brought up in Mount Waverley and we created her world very like where I was brought up.

One of the things I appreciate about your scripts, and I think it’s a real strength of your writing, is the seemingly endless number of quirks and idiosyncrasies that you find in your characters. For example in Mary and Max, Max catches flies, eats chocolate hotdogs, hates Thursdays and so forth. You seem to have this unending pool – and this harks back to all of your films – of eccentricities and peculiarities. Where do you find these? Are you always on the lookout?

I was interviewed by Margaret Pomeranz the other day and she asked me the same question. She said where do you get all this stuff? I said I can’t help myself, I love quirks and I love quirky films. When I sit down and write a script I never deliberately try to get all this stuff in there. I write intuitively. I don’t read those scriptwriting books. I don’t obsess about plot and I don’t obsess about the three act structure. I just hope that by the third or fourth draft those basics are there somehow. I start off with the details and work backwards. I said to a journalist, remember Sizzlers restaurants and all you can eat? It’s like going in there and getting a plate and I just want to cram as much on my plate as possible and cram as much in the film as I can. Because at the end of the day I am making the film for myself. It’s all for very selfish reasons. I am making a film that I would like to go and see and I just hope the rest of the world does too.

I don’t deny that I make very manipulative films. I try to not make them predictable; I try to keep the audience engaged…I’m not saying what I do is anything new or groundbreaking, but I think because it is in plasticine we can get away with a lot more. We can say a lot more. You have to suspend your disbelief immediately. You know that up on the screen there are these blobs of plasticine and you have to give over to them and go with it, go with the story.

You have an unusual ability to smoothly move from something whimsical and funny to something very dark and complex. To the audience it can feel uneasy, but it seems so organically a part of your films.

It’s what I call a double whammy. The moment I first discovered this device was in my second film, Cousin. In one moment you see a family portrait of my cousin and his parents and he’s wearing a ‘I Yodel for Jesus’ t-shirt, right at the same time you’re hearing that his parents have been killed in a car accident. I love that moment and I don’t think I have been able to achieve that moment as perfectly as I did in that film. The audience just don’t know what to do. They don’t know whether to laugh. It’s definitely a trick to keep them engaged.

In Mary and Max you presented New York in black and white and Australia in more earthy shades, using lots of brown. What was the logic behind the different use of colour?

I really wanted to use colour as a device in this film a lot more than I had in my previous films. I quickly worked out that if there are these two worlds we should really separate them by colour and of course New York is a very concrete place, a gray world. Australia in the 70s to me was very brown…We wanted to make Australia dehydrated, like a nicotine stain – that was the colour palette we decided on. We used spot red as a device to make all those little objects that Mary and Max send each other more potent, more significant. A little bit like what Spielberg did in Schindler’s List with that little girl in the red dress. It might come across as a bit pretentious but I thought well, no one else is doing this in animation. Most animation is all colour and movement. Every colour of the rainbow, all vibrant, and again we wanted to do something a bit different. It really suits the characters’ moods as well.

From a filmmaking perspective, do you have a favourite scene in Mary and Max? For me the Que Sara Sara scene is stunning. Emotionally it’s a highly charged, almost haunting moment, therefore you do realise you’ve probably ruined the song for a lot of people?

(Laughing) In Harvey Krumpet everyone loved the ‘God is Better Than Football’ wheelchair musical number. I thought oh look, I’m a gay man, I might as well put in a musical number. I had heard that version of Que Sara in a cafe, my partner’s cafe, and I thought god – that’s not Doris Day singing that! I did some research, found out the name of the band and we bought the rights to it and then animated to it. I don’t know. I probably haven’t had enough distance from the film to really have a favourite moment. I definitely have a preference for Max over Mary. I think he is a far more successful character. There are times when I think Mary isn’t quite as empathetic as I’d hoped.

In regards to animation techniques, you’ve been plying your trade for some time now and I imagine you get better at it over the years in terms of technical proficiency. However, according to what I read you were working to make just a handful of seconds of completed footage per day. With time and experience, how much easier does the process actually get?

On Mary and Max I didn’t actually do any of the animation. I employed six animators to do it for us. We had a huge crew: a support crew, a DOP and a huge lighting department. Each animator roughly did five seconds per day. So about 25 seconds a day was done; about two and a half minutes a week. That’s why the shoot took 57 weeks. It was a huge logistic nightmare to make this film. They worked out if I had have animated it, it would have taken 225 years (laughing) so I didn’t have a choice. And, to be honest, I don’t enjoy actually animating. I much prefer to design all the characters and write the script and the actual moving of the puppet is something I find extremely tedious. I would be happy to never do it again.

Can you confirm any future projects you’re working on? What else is on the horizon?

What I’m doing next is finishing drawing a kids book that I have written and illustrated. I have been working on it for 15 years so I’m keen to get that published and get that out of the way. No one will let me make another film until this one has reached some level of success. It’s mostly taxpayers’ money, so they have to get their money back before they let me back in the studio!

Review: Mary and Max

Here's a review of "Mary and Max," originally published in the Australian newspaper, The Age.

There's an exquisite moment of operatic pathos in the final act of Mary and Max that is pure pins and needles. It's the type of moment embedded in every Disney classic when everything - technique, story, artistry - combines perfectly to deliver a jaw-dropping instant of pure emotion.

Writer/director Adam Elliot builds so subtly towards his Disney moment that it hits unexpectedly, but, when it does, it's with a wave of empathy and heart-crushing sorrow for the girl at the heart of his tale.

Only long after the film, and with considerable effort, do you have to remind yourself that what you went all weak-kneed and misty-eyed over was a blob of plasticine--a superbly directed blob of plasticine.

With Mary and Max, Elliot does not merely make good on the promise shown in his Oscar-winning 2003 short Harvie Krumpet, he exceeds every conceivable expectation. Mary and Max is an unqualified triumph--a beautiful, witty, deeply emotional film that explores the innate human need to connect.

Using the painstaking, defiantly non-digital animation technique of stop-motion, Elliot immerses us in the suburban world of Mount Waverley circa 1976. The warm centre of his story is Mary Daisy Dinkle (Toni Collette), a bright eight-year-old girl who possesses an engaging and optimistic disposition despite her dull father and alcoholic mother.

Playing on her curious nature, Mary begins a pen-pal friendship with Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a lonely, lugubrious, overweight New York shut-in who wears tracky dacks and whose main achievement in life is the invention of the chocolate hot dog.

In a story bursting with rich characters and comic detail, the pair maintains a correspondence over many years, exchanging lengthy accounts of their various travails and often sending each other boxes filled with gifts, mementoes and photographs.

The film is pitted with weighty themes such as loneliness, child neglect, cruelty, sexual naivete, clinical anxiety, betrayal, guilt and the mortality rate of apartment-bound goldfish. Yet to tag Mary and Max as a mordant comedy is to miss the point of the film entirely.

Elliot does relent to the darker emotions but only sparingly and with precise dramatic force and purpose.

Life might be an uphill struggle for these characters, but Elliot refuses to surrender to despondency or bitterness. The story is laced with delicious observational humour that is dry and often sweetly ironic, and the emotional undertow of the film is graced with a subdued sense of celebration.

A caution to parents, though. Mary and Max is an adult film and, much as I adore it, the film's PG rating is arguably too generous.

Mary's gorgeous bulb-shaped face might look like a Peanuts character but this is not a film for very young or sensitive children. It deserved an M.

At a cost of $8million and with the Australian film industry in dire need of connecting with audiences, one does, of course, hope the film promptly finds the public it deserves. But it could prove a tough sell. The film does not fit neatly into any genre and Elliot himself admits he has trouble defining what type of film Mary and Max is.

Regardless, Mary and Max has the unmistakable feel of an animation classic. This is not a film that will date.

Stimulating cinema: Mary and Max

Director: Adam Elliott
Year: 2009

The time, 5:27 p.m. Thursday, September 1, 2011. Instead of doing what I am paid to do at work, I am trying to come up with the right words to describe this sweet, sad, wonderful gem of a movie. I think out of all the movies that I have written about so far in this little project of mine, this one had the most profound affect on me. And I think it's because I could relate to both characters, Mary Daisy Dinkle and Max Jerry Horowitz. There's a part of me in each of them and I felt what they were feeling as the movie unfolded. When they made this one, it's almost like they were walking around in my head. Scary right? Well, not really. You just need patience to understand some people and I am one of them.

Our setting is Australia, 1976. Mary (voiced by Bethany Whitmore as a youngster and Toni Collette as an adult) is an 8-year-old girl. She is a sad figure--plain-Jane, chubby and the frequent target of schoolyard teasing because of a "poo-colored" birthmark right in the middle of her forehead. Mary's father is emotionally unavailable (he spends all his spare time in the basement practicing taxidermy) and her mother is an alcoholic with a penchant for shoplifting. Mary is sad, but not without dignity. She makes her own toys (her favorite show is 'The Noblets') and is able to find some semblance of pleasure amid the wreck that is her homelife. What she doesn't have (save for her rooster, Ethel) is a true friend.

While at the post office with her mom one day (they are chased out when she's caught pilfering a box of envelopes), Mary decides to write--at random--to a person she picks out of the New York City phone directory. And what a person that is! Max (voiced in world-weary fashion by Phillip Seymour Hoffman) is a real piece of work. Fueled by a steady stream of chocolate hot dogs (his own culinary creation, of which there are many), he tops the 350-pound mark. He goes to Overeaters Anonymous meetings but struggles with both his diet and people in general. We later learn Max suffers from Asperger's Syndrome (he's an 'Aspie'). Asperger's is an autism spectrum disorder that is characterized by significant difficulties in social interaction, along with restricted and repetitive patterns of behavior and interests. And Max has all these in spades. What he doesn't have (except for an invisible fellow called Mr. Ravioli) is a true friend.

A friendship ensues between these long-distance penpals. Max gives Mary some good advice on how to deal with her tormentor at school. Mary tries to help Max come up with ways to lose weight. Chocolate products of every imaginable stripe cross the ocean between the two. It's not always smooth sailing--at one point, a letter from Mary throws Max into a anxiety-induced meltdown that causes him to be institutionalized for eight months. Mary loses faith in her friend but only briefly; Max is able to rally himself and resume communication once he gets out of the mental hospital.

Mary grows up both of her parents die and she enrolls in university, where she immerses herself in the study of mental disorders. She also gets married to her childhood crush, but that ends disastrously for Mary. As does the book she writes on Max; his response to being the subject of her thesis is fury and rage and sends Mary into a downward spiral. But through it all--which is the ups and downs of life on this planet--the friendship perseveres. Sometimes the bond is strong, sometimes it's very fragile, but it's always there and for that Mary and Max are grateful. Will they ever meet face-to-face, though. That's the key question and something that is settled in a way that is very satisfying and emotionally resonant.

This is a Claymation production--the first one I have ever seen and the look of the movie just rules. The amount of time that went into making the film was Herculean--according to the Wikipedia entry principal photography lasted over 57 weeks, using 133 separate sets, 212 puppets, and 475 miniature props, including a fully functioning Underwood typewriter which apparently took nine weeks to design and build. The writing--also from Elliott--is tremendous. Yes, there are dark, depressing undertones throughout but that's life. Life isn't always candy cane skies and lemon drop trees. Sometimes you get picked on. Sometimes your parents suck. Sometimes you can't control your appetite and your buttcrack shows when you bend over. Stuff happens! But Elliott is able to find humor in the depressing ordinariness most of us have to deal with day in and day out.

I can't say enough good things about this film; I'd give it 1,000 stars and 20 thumbs-up.

Stimulating cinema: Kenny

Director: Clayton Jacobson
Year: 2006

Let's get it out of the way right from the top--yes, the movie has lots of jokes about poop. The main character, Kenny Smyth, works for Splashdown(!), a company that rents out portable loos for events like concerts, fairs and festivals. So naturally Kenny, being the kind of guy he is, takes pride in his work and shares his knowledge with us, the viewers. So there is a lot of talk about bodily functions but it's handled in such away that you just smile, rather than recoil in disgust.

My wife and I were talking not long ago about how foreign films often times handle similar subject matters so much differently from their Hollywood counterparts. We both agreed that many times a foreign film will be more measured, more restrained--whereas in Hollywood, we get hit over the head with enough special effects and dead bodies to make your head spin. I would shudder to think what Hollywood would do with this topic--undoubtedly it would turn into an R-rated gross fest, complete with sight gags that would make you gag. But "Kenny" skirts the subject matter with grace and humor. Although a lot of the people that Kenny encounters in his day-to-day dealings are pretty put out at what he does, we never are.

Kenny (played by Shane Jacobson, brother of the director) works in Melbourne for the above-mentioned "Splashdown." He is just about the most amiable, even-tempered, good-hearted bloke you'll ever see on the big screen. He has a wonderful sense of humor and doesn't take himself to seriously (he has an "arsenal" of aftershaves on his sink, something of a necessity in his line of work, he tells us). He tries his best to look after his crotchety dad and his son (Kenny is separated), walking the careful tightrope that separated parents often times have to do.

Kenny goes about his day with such good, positive energy that it's impossible not to root for him. This is a character you really want to see do well. When he ends up traveling to Nashville for the International Pumper and Cleaner Expo (where he charmingly goes around introducing himself as "Kenny from Australia"), he starts to get chummy with a stewardess. Later, when they meet up again in Nashville, she's clearly interested and I was practically shouting at the screen for our guy to make his move. Kenny is everyman, except with a wittier sense of humor. His problems are the same problems we all have--not the problems of millionaires we can't related to.

I didn't even know this movie existed until a couple of weeks ago and I'm so glad I made its acquaintance. If Jacobson ended up playing Hamlet on the London stage, it wouldn't be a better role him than this one. The dialogue, the jokes, the supporting cast--everything here is dead-on target. If you watch this, I guarantee you will not see a warmer, funnier or more human comedy all year long.