Plasticine with character

Mary & Max. Photo / Supplied

With a cast of crazy-looking characters in place, claymation film director Adam Elliot went about assembling a star cast of voices to bring his animated feature-length debut, Mary & Max, to life. And the ones he picked were up for anything.

As the narrator, Barry Humphries may let Dame Edna's distinctive voice creep in at times, but heartthrob Eric Bana must have been struggling to keep a straight face as he voiced the gay Greek nerd who falls in love with an elderly Kiwi sheep farmer. And you would never know that the voice of Max, one of the leads in this penpals' story, was Philip Seymour Hoffman, while Mary the more recognisable Toni Collette.

"With each of my films, I aim as high as I possibly can and they'll say no and it'll end up being my brother or someone else," admits the ever-chirpy Elliot who won the best animated short film Oscar for Harvie Krumpet in 2004. "But this time so many of my wishes came true."

In the same way he hired Geoffrey Rush to be the narrator of Harvie Krumpet, Elliot was keen to enlist talented actors who hadn't done this kind of work before. Still, Hoffman was a longshot.

"Philip was at the top of our list and it took quite a few attempts to get him. We couldn't pay him the money he normally gets, but he did it because he liked the script, so that was a big relief. Mary's got a little bit of Muriel in her, so Toni was good for her. As for Eric, his parents are European and luckily he just lives down the road in Melbourne. His kids are big Harvie Krumpet fans and we took them on a studio tour and showed them all the puppets. So that was a done deal."

Naturally, the voice work is only a tiny fraction of the effort that goes into making an animated feature. "Claymation is the most expensive artform in the world," Elliot notes. "My movies take five years from the time of coming up with the idea to seeing it on screen, and that includes 57 weeks of shooting. So at this rate I think I can do only two a decade."

Working outside the Hollywood system doesn't help. Yet he says though the likes of Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Park and the Aardman animators have plenty of money to throw around, at least he has the freedom to do exactly what he wants.

"I had total control over Mary and Max. It was my screenplay, it was my storyboard and I designed all the characters. It was a lot of work, but it means I can deal with subject matter the Aardmans wouldn't go near. Their next film is about pirates and I'm sure none of those pirates will have Tourette's Syndrome [Harvie] or Asperger's [Max].

"I try to strive for authenticity with the characters and even though they're blobs of plasticine, I really want audiences to empathise with them. I don't deliberately give them these afflictions, flaws and disabilities, it's just these are the people around me. Like, my penfriend does have Asperger's. How could I not include that in the story since it's an intrinsic part of who he is?

Every time I sit down to write a screenplay I think this one's going to be commercial and by page three the character's got Tourette's or something."

Another thing Elliott insists on is his use of a narrator, which is unpopular with investors. "I tell them it's my job as a filmmaker to push the boundaries and I ask them to let me see if I can make it work. With Mary and Max having one narrator for the whole film would have been hard to tolerate so that's why we decided that Toni and Philip would do a lot of voice-over to sort of break it up.

"It was difficult to get the right rhythm and pace and we spent ages editing the film so it wasn't too overbearing. Originally the film was 105 minutes and we cut it back to 92 minutes."

Elliot must be doing something right as Mary and Max became the first animated film to open the Sundance Film Festival. He compares it to having his children go out into the world. And like real children, he says, they never go away. "I was in the supermarket when I'd just got back from Sundance and a group of school kids shrieked, 'Ooh, there's Harvie Krumpet'. Even in a little town near Sundance where the film screened, in the newspaper the next day they wrote how everyone loved the film Mary and Max, but they were even more thrilled that the director, Harvie Krumpet, introduced it. It really is like having children. You're very proud of them but after a time you really wish they'd go away."

Lowdown

What: Mary & Max, animated-claymation feature from director Adam Elliot
Opens: In cinemas, today