PARK CITY, Utah--The Sundance Film Festival broke the mold--so to speak--when it kicked off Thursday night with a feature-length clay animation film, Mary and Max, which innovated on many levels.
Robert Redford opens the Sundance Film Festival in Park City, Utah, Thursday night.
(Credit: Michelle Meyers)Robert Redford's annual opening night speech, which preceded the screening, was the perfect prelude to the Australian-made film. After assuring the packed auditorium that "even when times are bad (economically and politically)...it can be good for artists," Redford assured the audience that Sundance would continue to be a showcase for work that's diverse, unique, and often full of "surprise."
And when it came to Mary and Max, all three applied. It was certainly no Nemo or Wallace and Gromit film.
Directed by Adam Elliot and produced by Melanie Coombs, Mary and Max is the tale of two unlikely pen pals: Mary, played by Toni Collette, is a lonely, chubby, 8-year-old girl living in the Melbourne suburbs, and Max, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, is a 44-year-old severely obese New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome.
The film is dark in terms of humor, content, and aesthetic. Both main characters are constantly struggling personally, death surrounds them, and even their relationship goes through tumultuous times.
But at the same time, it's also a sweet film, conveying the importance of friendship, and of accepting oneself for strengths and weaknesses.
"We all have disabilities," Elliot said in a question-and-answer session after the screening. "It's about accepting your flaws and not trying to hide behind them."
No matter how immersed you get in the characters and the storyline, it's impossible to watch the film without marveling at the impressive animation, which got zero help from computer graphics. It was 100 percent "in-camera," as Elliot explained, which meant every single shot was taken of an actual, physical object that had been manipulated. The rain was actually fishing wire; the fire was red cellophane; the water was 50 tubes of sexual lubricant, he said.
That also meant the 92-minute film took 57 weeks to shoot, working almost seven days a week.
A promo from 'Mary and Max'
"It was like making love and being stabbed to death at the same time," Elliot said about tedious filming process. "It was like watching paint dry."
The film's old-school stop-motion animation techniques were, however, helped along tremendously by modern day technology: Each frame was shot with Canon Digital SLR still image cameras, which capture raw images in a 4K motion-picture resolution. Cutting-edge software allowed the filmmakers to get instant feedback on shots. And an innovative post-production content management system was also used and designed especially for the film.
Still, what drives Mary and Max is the story, which Elliot said was based on his own "pen friend" who he has been writing for more than two decades and to whom he dedicated the film.
This is Elliot and Coombs' second film at Sundance. Their 2004 Sundance film Harvie Krumpet went on to win the Academy Award for best-animated short film. It was announced Thursday that Mary and Max will also screen at the Berlin International Film Festival in February.
Mary and Max is just the first of 118 feature-length and 96 short films that will premiere at the festival, which runs through January 25 and is celebrating its 25th anniversary.
The theme for this year's Sundance Film Festival kicking off this week is "Storytime," apropos considering stories are the heart of each and every film.
However, many of the stories at Robert Redford's 10-day indie film festival--which kicks of Thursday in Park City, Utah, and runs through January 25--are told outside the screening rooms. They're told at panels and forums, through art installations, and via online offerings--with technology often key to the plotline.
The bulk of the festival offerings for the digerati take place under New Frontier (PDF), which is a programming category featuring films that challenge conventional form; art installations at the crossroads of art technology and film; and public forums covering innovations in cinematic culture.
Feature-length New Frontier films range from the likes of Lunch Break (PDF), by Sharon Lockhart, a single tracking shot through a long corridor where workers take their lunch at a Maine shipyard, to Where is Where (PDF), a four-channel film based on an incident that took place during Algeria's struggle for independence.
The art installation, located in the New Frontier on Main venue (featured in slideshow below), also pushes new limits this year, with two works, in particular, by technologists. In We Feel Fine, for example, by programmers Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar, the installation takes sentences every few minutes from recently published blogs from around the world that include the words "I feel" or "I am feeling" and visualizes them in six different movements.
Another scientist/artist showcasing work at New Frontier is John Underkoffler, who helped out on the film Minority Report and invented that trick in which Tom Cruise wears gloves that could grab and move computer images in space. Underkoffler developed that idea into a new system for editing film that's the focus of his installation, Tamper.
"We're finding that our artists are no longer looking at technology as a sort of novelty, a 'Gee whiz, what can I do with it?' They're already fully engaged and what's emerging is highlighted at the New Frontier," said Ian Calderon, Sundance's director of digital initiatives. "This is very different from some of the primitive video art you saw in the 1970s and 80s. This is a quantum leap forward because the tools are there, the technology is there."
New Frontier's noon panels this year have also evolved to be less about specific hardware and technological advances, and more about what content creators can do with such advances, Calderon said. One panel on Sunday, for example, is all about new models and experiments in digital distribution.
"Our filmmakers are no longer waiting to be called by Hollywood," Calderon said. "They're finding like-minded audiences, they're building communities, they're self-producing their own work. They know more about viral marketing than maybe even the retail industry."
Perhaps the most star-studded panel, at least as far as the tech world is concerned, is titled "Where Do We Go From Here? Icons of the Digital Age." The Saturday panel will be moderated by Kara Swisher of All Things D and will feature Netflix's Reed Hastings, YouTube's Chad Hurley, and Hulu's Jason Kilar.
Other panels address the use of virtual reality in film and Web content for the small screen.
"Our audience wants what they want, when they want it, and they want to take it with them," Calderon said. "Schedulized programming is going to be a thing of the past."
That said, another tech-related component of the festival relates to the film shorts program, for which submissions grew 10 percent from last year to 5,632. A record 96 shorts were selected to screen at the festival, 10 of which will be available for free rental at the Sundance iTunes Store during the course of the festival.
I'll be checking out all of the above in Park City. Stay tuned for more coverage as the festival gets under way Thursday night with the premiere of Mary and Max, an animated film that also showcases technology.
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