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Award winning film with disability themes exhibited at ACMI
The creative and technical processes behind the acclaimed Australian animation Mary and Max form part of an exhibition at Australian Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, providing behind-the-scene insight into the feature film that took five years to make, including one year of filming.
Mary and Max is the award winning claymation based on the story of a friendship between an eight-year-old girl from Melbourne and a severely obese 44-year-old New Yorker with Asperger's Syndrome. Other characters in the feature include Max's cleaner, who has low vision and Mary's neighbour, who is a wheelchair user with agoraphobia.
Items on display include character models, as well as sets, props such as vehicles, a phone box, Max’s TV, conceptual sketches and storyboards. The exhibition also features stills and clips from the finished film, time-lapse sequences showing the animators at work, and behind-the-scenes footage shot for a making-of style ‘mockumentary’.
The director, writer and designer, Adam Elliot has personally selected the figures, props and sets to include in this exhibition.“The diversity and complexity of the sets for Mary and Max was extreme; everything from a desert island to a chocolate heaven needed to be made. The New York skyline set was the biggest and most time consuming and took two months to complete by the entire art department crew of 20 people,” he said. “So it’s nice to be able to ‘lift the veil’ on the whole process for ACMI visitors.”
Mary and Max, Elliot’s debut feature with longtime collaborator producer Melanie Coombs, enjoyed its world premiere as the opening night film of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival and has since screened at film festivals the world over, winning several coveted awards including Best Animation at the Asia Pacific Screen Awards, the Inside Film Award for Best Production Design and numerous others.
Watch a DVD online at ABC Arts to learn more about the exhibition or visit the ACMI website to watch an interview with Adam Elliot about his artistic process with claymation.
Mary and Max: The Exhibition continues at ACME until 6 June 2010. Entry is free.