Animated: Ocean Grove’s Charlotte Malone sneaks a peek of an Adam Elliott scene at Geelong Gallery.
Erin Pearson
FROM the silver screen to a worldwide tour, Adam Elliot’s latest plasticine production has finally landed in Geelong.
Stopping at Geelong Gallery during summer, Mary and Max: The Exhibition explores the processes behind the Australian’s cinema animation.
The exhibition features thousands of items created for the film alongside imagery from the finished work.
Promoters said patrons can see the “imagination, ingenuity and painstaking work” that goes into a 92-minute, stop-motion animation project like Mary and Max.
Items on display include character models, sets, props, conceptual sketches and storyboards along with clips from the film and time-lapse sequences showing animators at work.
Similar to Elliot’s previous works, Mary and Max chronicles simultaneous life stories of two contrasting personalities, in this case pen pals on different continents over two decades.
Mary Dinkle is a chubby, lonely eight-year-old in Melbourne’s suburbs, while Max Horowitz is an obese, 44-year-old New York Jew with Asperger’s syndrome.
Elliot said making the film took five years.
“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,” he said.
“The New York skyline set was the biggest and most time-consuming and took two months to complete by the art department crew of 20 people, so it’s nice to be able to lift the veil on the whole process for Victorian audiences.”
Elliot navigated an intriguing road to stardom.
He was raised on an outback shrimp farm with his retired acrobatic clown father, hairdresser mother and three siblings.
Elliot was born with a tremor, which he has described as his “chunky-wonky” characteristic.
After leaving high school he spent five years hand-painting T-shirts at a craft market before arriving at Victorian College of the Arts in 1996 to study animation.
He later won the academy award for Harvie Krumpet, which in 2003 was named as one of Annecy International Animation Festival’s top 100 animated films of all time.
Mary and Max: The Exhibition will be at Geelong Gallery until February 13.
