For the first time the prestigious Sundance film festival has opened with an animated feature – a claymation work from Australian creator Adam Elliot (who was behind the Oscar winning Harvie Krumpet; as I’ve said before, the animated shorts in the film awards lists are often the place to look for innovative, interesting new work). Although a small budget, independent movie Mary and Max – which Adam described in an interview on IndieWire as exploring his fascination with human flaws – has attracted some seriously heavyweight talent to the voice acting, including one of my favourite actors Philip Seymour Hoffman, as well as Toni Colette and Eric Bana.
(Max hammering out another letter to his pen friend Mary)
Its great to see Sundance having this kind of painstaking animation for an opening film and hopefully it will help give it some more of that critical buzz – getting funding to make an independent movie is hard but even if a film maker manages it they then have a new struggle to get the film noticed and distributed, which is where the word of mouth generated by positive reactions on the international film festival circuit plays a crucial role. There is an official site online now, although some of the features (like the trailer) are still to follow(but there are some working pieces like the behind the scenes webisodes), but from what I can see it looks like an interesting adult animation; I’d certainly like to see it.(via New York Press)
May 11th, 2009 at 9:51 am
LUV IT