Word: elliot
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...Miranda Dear, SBS Independent's commissioning editor for drama, he landed on her desk accompanied by a handwritten note. It was March 2003, and it had taken Melbourne animator Adam Elliot three years to get the right ingredients and balance of flavors for his 22-min. short film Harvie Krumpet. "Well, here he is," the note declared, "almost fully baked...
...life epic, from his Polish pine-forest birth before World War II to his Alzheimer's fug in a Melbourne retirement village, garnered his Claymation creator a nod for Best Short Film (Animated) at next week's Academy Awards ceremony. Up against toon titans Pixar, Disney and Blue Sky, Elliot and his tragicomic creation, who endures Tourette's syndrome and testicular cancer before seizing the day as an avid animal liberationist and nudist, is perhaps the ultimate underdog. (Seven years ago, an Oscar went to a similarly off-kilter outsider - Shine's Geoffrey Rush, whose presence as Harvie Krumpet...
...shorts acquired by broadcaster sbs, to the cerebral palsy of Cousin (1998) and asthmatic fits of Brother (1999). But more often than not, they don't. "When I was older, my auntie drank rat poison and died," says the narrator of Uncle, which sets the tone in the Elliot oeuvre for outlandish deaths. As for the carnage in Krumpet, Harvie's parents are found frozen naked on their bike, Dr. Angela Greystane dies horribly from emphysema, the cancer-ward nurse Harvie marries collapses from a brain clot, fellow retiree Wilma overdoses on morphine - and that's not counting the animals...
...Death, Elliot says, defines us. And it's just one of a handful of tricks this dark prince of plasticine uses "to make these little blobs as human as possible." His seemingly simple aesthetic is in fact amazingly detailed - every miniature prop, from the curtains on Harvie's TV set to the wallpaper, is handmade - and filmed in a painstaking stop-motion process that took 14 months. "It's very meditative," Elliot says. "You can't rush it." It's also mesmerizing. The film's showstopper is a Busby Berkeley-inspired dream sequence involving Alzheimer's patients in wheelchairs...
General synopsis: It’s important to him to have a lot of music that most people don’t know, making the Beyoncé and Missy Elliot stuff that he has seem like ironic choices for his playlist. It also seems that in a lot of these songs the music is more important than the lyrics or the singing. I haven’t heard of many of these bands, but I like a lot of his indie rock stuff—this group Experimental Dental School is pretty good. He’d probably...