It’s a big day for clay animation with the announcement that Aussie director Adam Elliot’s Mary & Max, a new animated flick which stars the voices of Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman, will open this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
According to the press release: “Mary and Max is the tale of two unlikely pen pals: Mary, a lonely, eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old, severely obese man living in New York. The story is based on the director’s own pen-friendship that has also lasted over twenty years.”
Frankly, this genre has always creeped us out (apologies go out to both Wallace and Gromit — we blame Gumby), but Collette and Seymour Hoffman are two of our favorite actors, so we’ll wait for a trailer to go up before we pass judgment. But if the opening night films of the past few years are any indication (In Bruges, Chicago 10, Friends With Money), this will be a critical hit that makes no money — in other words, the opposite of Australia.