Word: krumpet
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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...
...cooking with gas. Forget Cate, Nicole or any of the other expected hopefuls - Harvek Milos Krumpetzki, an eccentric Polish migrant with pallid skin and ears protruding like Duchamp urinals, is Australia's unlikeliest Oscar contender. Last month the fictional Krumpet's 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...
...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. "Yeah, I've got a high body count," the filmmaker...
...stores around Melbourne; his mother bears an uncanny resemblance to Harvie's wife - also a knitter - called Val. (For the record, brother Luke didn't succumb to asthma like his screen counterpart in Brother; he acts in the prize-winning short Roy Hollsdotter Live, which is released with Harvie Krumpet in Australian theaters this week; the latter screens on sbs-tv March 8.) And as for Harvie's existential angst, it's all about Adam. "I've struggled with the meaning of life over the years," admits Elliot, who dropped out of graphic-design school to sell T shirts...
Unlike Harvie, Elliot is both resourceful and entrepreneurial. For the Krumpet shoot, he used an empty container from his dad's storage business, and employed the considerable knitting skills of his mother. Already he's launched Harvie the brand, with his own DVD and website. It's "a great step to whatever the next thing is," says Miranda Dear, "which, of course, we all hope is a feature film." On this subject, Elliot grows as quiet as one of his Claymation creatures, before pointing out that it was 20 years before Aardman Studios (of Wallace and Gromit fame) embarked...
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