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All my films deal with difference; people who are afflicted or marginalised ...'
- Adam Elliot1
Animation, itself a historically marginalised form of filmmaking, seems to lend itself more readily than live-action filmmaking to the treatment of difficult or taboo subject matter, particularly disability.2 This may be due to what Australian animator Anne Jolliffe calls 'its light touch - its magic'3 and because it is not perceived as 'real'.
Adam Elliot's tragicomic 'clayographies' all centre on marginalised characters drawn from his own experience: characters that are often lonely, confused and suffering from various forms of addiction. His films have screened at over 500 film festivals and have garnered in excess of 100 awards, including five AFI awards from six nominations: more than any other Australian director. Elliot, who was born with a physiological tremor and whose own homosexuality has contributed to his feeling of being an outsider, notes that he has 'always related to characters who are lonely and melancholic'.4 Elliot is the official patron of The Other Film Festival, Australia's only film festival by, for and about the disabled <http://www.otherfilmfestival.com>. Elliot's blackand- white film trilogy - Uncle (1996), Cousin (1998) and Brother (1999) - is now one of the country's most highly awarded and successful collections of short films. Uncle, his student film, focuses on an isolated, idiosyncratic character that is an amalgam of a number of the filmmaker's relatives; Cousin is an autobiographical film based on his cousin who has cerebral palsy; and Brother projects some of Elliot's personal traits onto a fictional brother figure.
In 2004, Harvie Krumpet (2003) became the second Australian animated film to win an Oscar (following Bruce Petty's Leisure [1976] in 1977). In addition, the film won three of the four major prizes at Annecy, the world's largest animation festival, and Best Australian Short Award at the 2003 Melbourne International Film Festival. In 2006, Variety included the short in their top 100 animated films of all time. Mary and Max (2009), Elliot's first feature-length animation and the second Australian stop-motion feature film (the first was Israeli/Australian co-production $9.99 [Tatia Rosenthal, 2009]), is the first Australian film to open the Sundance Film Festival. In 2009 it received a special mention in the Generation 14plus category at the Berlin...