Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell
Adam Elliot (director), Mary and Max (2009)
The stop-motion clay animation film Mary and Max (2009) by the writer, director, and production designer Adam Elliot, tells the story of two odd, lonely and flawed individuals, Mary and Max, from vastly different backgrounds who find each other almost by accident and bring happiness into each other’s lives. It is meant to be an uplifting story, especially for those who feel they do not seem to fit in to the mainstream, or for those who feel they may have difficulty making friends. In this regard, the film offers hope.
Mary and Max establish a long-term friendship that is very satisfying. The film suggests that it just takes a little courage to initially reach out to someone, and then a little patience to tolerate the other person’s idiosyncrasies and foibles that may cause friction from time to time. Friendship is presented as a great benefit and constant in one’s life, since someone is there for you through life’s great highs and lows. Friendship is presented as involving both self-acceptance and the acceptance of others, despite the flaws that you or others may have. Through all the ups and downs in her life, Mary has her friendship with Max, which continues despite his anxiety attacks, bouts of difficult behaviour, and extended periods of not communicating.
The film’s treatment of the idiosyncratic characteristics of Mary and Max invites the cinema audience to appreciate that everyone is flawed in some way and to some degree, and we can all be seen as quirky and eccentric. Imperfection and having what could be perceived as peculiar or unexpected traits should be appreciated as universal. We should accept that in ourselves and in others, and this should not be a barrier to people getting together.
In this context, Adam Elliot promotes disability rights in the sense that he rejects the labels of ‘handicapped’ or ‘disabled’ for those with mental or physical disabilities, presenting all his characters as, to some extent, flawed. This implies that no one is perfect and if everyone is flawed we only differ in degree. His characters accept their flaws and this serves to encourage viewers to accept their own flaws.
Max accepted the parts of his character that reflect the symptoms of Asperger’s syndrome, a form of autism. He does not want to change or be cured. He just wants to be accepted by others. He sees these traits as part of who he is. Since he accepts it, the implication is that others should also accept this about him and not try to cure him. Being an ‘Aspie’, as he likes to call himself, is part of his identity. The film puts the onus on others to accept him and others like him for who they are. At one stage, Mary had to be reminded of that when she writes a PhD thesis in psychology using him as a case study, where the implication is that her quest to understand him was a mistaken quest to cure him. In this film, mental illness or physical disability is not necessarily a problem if you do not perceive it that way. In this film, mental illness or physical disability is treated as an eccentricity that is part of who someone is as an individual. It is not grounds for alienation. This notion is reinforced by the fact that all the characters in the film are presented as flawed and have a mental or physical disability or both.
The film promotes an old-fashioned form of friendship, being a pen pal. Two people correspond regularly over a period and form a connection on the basis of their letters. The letters would be hand-written or typed, and posted in the mail. This made the arrival of a letter seem special, and the effort to write a letter makes each correspondence seem more like a gift of something intimate. In this film, the pen pals Mary and Max share a long-term relationship although they never meet in person, since they lived on separate continents. But that is part of the charm of this form of relationship. It can be intimately close while being geographically distant. The relationship between Mary and Max is inspired by a pen pal relationship that the filmmaker Adam Elliot had with an old Jewish man in New York. Adam Elliot promotes letters rather than email, social media, or mobile phones, which are far more immediate and technology based. Giving and receiving letters is presented in the film as a special event to be savoured.
The film is a deliberate attempt to preserve and celebrate an old fashioned style of animated filmmaking ̶ stop-motion clay animation ̶ in the face of changing technology involving computer generated imagery (CGI). Adam Elliot works with clay, hand-sculptured figurines rather than digital imagery. This represents a determined avoidance of what Adam Elliot regards as computer fakery. Everything in the film that you see is real in that it has been built in real life and then filmed. Therefore everything exists in three dimensions. The characters were actual models made from polymers, clay, plastic and metal, which were hand animated, frame by frame. The sets and settings were constructed and some took many months to build. The team of filmmakers took years to construct their images and wanted their intimate care and attention to detail to be visible to viewers to give the film a distinctive charm unlikely to be achieved with computer animation.
Student resources by Dr Mark Lopez
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The purpose of the concise notes of Dr Mark’s The Meaning in a Nutshell is to provide much needed help to students seeking to unlock the meaning of the texts with which they have to deal. (More elaborate notes are provided in lessons as part of my private tutoring business.)
Subject: Mary and Max meaning, Mary and Max themes, Mary and Max analysis, Mary and Max notes