The 2009 Sundance Film Festival will open with Adam Elliot's clay animation feature Mary and Max, the tale of an 8-year-old Australian girl who becomes the pen pal of an obese, 44-year-old male New Yorker. Throughout their two-decade exchanges, they discuss a wide range of subjects, from autism to taxidermy.
Written and directed by Elliot, who won an Academy Award for his 2002 animated short Harvie Krumpet, Mary and Max sounds like a quirky variation on the 84 Charing Cross Road theme, the James Roose-Evans play that became a 1984 movie directed by David Hugh Jones, and starring Anne Bancroft and Anthony Hopkins as long-term, pen-paling bookworms. She in New York; he in London.
Mary and Max features the voices of Toni Collette, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Barry Humphries (aka Dame Edna Everage), and Eric Bana.
Sundance 2009 runs between January 15-25. Films in the dramatic and documentary competitions will be announced in early December.
Sundance, Prop. 8, and Boycotts
Danny Boyle, GOMORRAH, WALTZ WITH BASHIR: AFI FEST 2008
THE WRESTLER, EVERLASTING MOMENTS, LA RABIA: AFI FEST 2008
Tilda Swinton, Juliette Binoche, Bill Plympton: AFI FEST 2008
THE DESERT WITHIN, TWO-LEGGED HORSE, Documentary Shorts: AFI FEST 2008
ACHILLES AND THE TORTOISE, THE BROTHERS BLOOM: AFI FEST 2008
POUNDCAKE, WITCHHUNT, KASSIM THE DREAM, OF ALL THE THINGS: AFI FEST 2008
THE BAADER MEINHOF COMPLEX, JOHNNY MAD DOG: bfi London Film Festival 2008
Quirky but interesting animation. Can't say I'd recommend Mary and Max to all my friends, but some of them would very much enjoy it. You have to have an offbeat sense of humor and an offbeat way of looking at thing to be able to enjoy this film. But those who are that way will certainly enjoy it very much.