Animator Adam Elliot has made a career out of affectionate, short filmic portraits of 'the outsider'. That culminated in his Oscar-winning 2003 short film Harvie Krumpet, the hero of which had Tourette's syndrome, and whose adopted daughter was a thalidomide baby.
Elliot's feature film debut, Mary and Max, is no exception. Both its title characters are misfits in their very different worlds. Mary is a socially awkward young adolescent, growing up in 1970s suburban Melbourne with her alcoholic mother and neglectful father. Max is a lonely New Yorker, a chronic overeater with undiagnosed Asperger's.
The film traces Mary and Max's unlikely pen-friendship over a course of decades. Isolated in their own social environments, they come to yearn for the human contact the letters provide. It's a paean to the power of friendship, although neither character quite realises the impact their letters have on the other.
'Mary gives Max panic attacks for the first half of the film,' says Elliot, talking to Eureka Street after the film's first screening for Melbourne media. 'The first draft of the script was very tame. But I realised there was not enough conflict, not enough drama. So they don't provoke each other deliberately, but they do unintentionally disturb each other.'
The film, like Elliot's earlier short films, uses a painstaking form of stop-motion animation, popularly known as 'claymation'. The medium has featured famously in more child-oriented fare such as the Wallace and Grommit films, and the TV series Gumby.
But while Mary and Max is animated, it's no kids film. It has its share of darker moments, including a suicide attempt and references to child abuse, as well as the more explicit portrayals of alcoholism, kleptomania and all manner of social disorders. Ultimately there are themes of betrayal and forgiveness, hope and redemption.
'Why can't you have dark themes in animation?' says Elliot. 'Is there a rule? Did Warner Bros make some Bugs Bunny rule 20 years ago that you're not allowed to have animated characters who die or try to kill themselves?
'There's a whole generation of animated feature films coming out now that deal with more adult themes', he adds. 'There's Persepolis, and Waltzing with Bashir, and even as far back as The Triplets of Belleville. It's great, because it means animation is evolving.'
Elliot is interested in portraying life in all its beauty and ugliness. He draws liberally (and affectionately) from the lives of those around him.