Cynematik

While I was watching MARY AND MAX, the opening film at Sundance, I kept thinking that it all seemed so familiar. The style of the claymation characters, the sensibility of the storytelling, and the director. It all just seemed so familiar.The director, Adam Elliott made a funny comment that being a stop-motion animation filmmaker was like making love and being stabbed to death at the same time. Oh the pleasure and the pain. It seems that only a true purist with a high threshold for pain would embrace clay animation. MARY AND MAX involved a 57-week shoot with 212 puppets, 133 sets and more than 1,026 mouths cast so the characters can speak. What was paining me was not knowing why it all seemed so familiar. And then, (after a few short minutes on the internet), I remembered. Adam Elliott was the same fellow who did the short film HARVIE KRUMPET. The Academy-Award Winning film (2003) was at Sundance 2004. Harvie was a one-testicled fellow who married a nurse and raised an adopted Thalidomide daughter. Like MARY AND MAX, Harvie was a typically-flawed human (a familiar theme from Elliott) who had a number of surprisingly gruesome life experiences and lots of graphic body functions. Like Harvie, Max and Mary endured difficult existences but found peace and satisfaction at the end. At the end of MARY AND MAX, I found myself crying for them, for me, for all of humanity. Such fragile creatures we humans are.