Clay animated feature MARY AND MAX is set to open the 2009 Sundance Film Festival, the first time for an Australian film. The film, about an unlikely pen pal friendship from Australian animator Adam Elliot, will play January 15 at Park City, Utah's Eccles Center Theatre.
MARY AND MAX is a simple tale of a pen-pal friendship between two very different people: Mary Dinkle (Toni Collette) is a chubby. lonely 8-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a 44-year-old, severely obese Jewish man with Asperger's Syndrome living in the chaos of New York.
The film will be narrated by Australian actor and drag queen Barry Humphries, known also as the voice of Bruce the Shark in Disney-Pixar's FINDING NEMO.
Elliot's HARVIE KRUMPET played at Sundance in 2004 and won the Oscar that year for Best Animated Short. MARY AND MAX is based on Elliot's real-life pen-pal relationship over the last 20 years, according to THE SALT LAKE CITY TRIBUNE.
Sundance runs January 15-25, 2009 in Park City, Utah. MARY AND MAX, from Melodrama Pictures, an Australian film and television company, is set for an April 2009 release in Australia. The studio is looking for a U.S. distributor.
