Geoff Gilmore Speaking at the Festival

I also attended the opening night ceremonies, and I did so with specific reason. I regretted going last year, but now that I think about it in retrospect I am glad I did. I tend to avoid the star-studded glamor personalities who show up for press and “indie-cred,” all in plentiful supply last year. I would even say it was somewhat so this time around. Luckily, I also avoided most of this by going to the second screening. Robert Redford went off to his party and there was little to no press at the second showing. Instead, I received a heartfelt speech given by the mayor of Park City, in which he not only applauded the festival, but also gave what he said was a rare political plug for the upcoming festivities on Tuesday morning, calling Barack Obama “the greatest president of my lifetime.” While he may have jumped the gun a bit on that one, they are having a jumbo-screen presentation of the inauguration right on main street. In addition to having a low key introduction, the movie was also not the usual opening movie.

While Professor Andersen covered the general plot outline in a thorough fashion, there were some key parts of the opening festivities that really stuck out for me. Adam Elliot, the director, gave a quaint opening to the film in which he said, “making a stop-motion film is like making love while being stabbed.” A feeling that is believable by the fact that he said production took 54 weeks, and his 100-something animators filmed about five minutes a day. Painstaking and brutal to be sure, he stayed true to the art form saying that there was not a single frame of the movie that contained any computer generated images. The rain was made from fishing line, the fire from cellophane, and the bath bubbled were what looked like tiny Styrofoam balls.

The most astounding part about the movie I thought were the flies. In the opening montage and in another few parts of the movie there were flies that buzzed around. I thought they were brilliant because of their life-like qualities, the fact that they were suspended in the air, and that their wings looked so real. In fact this was the case with almost every part of the movie. Though the clay didn’t look real, everything was so believable. One was able to just be immersed and get lost in the world that this movie created. Along with that came the great ability to play with the audiences emotions. My mental state followed the characters scene for scene. When they were up, I felt a warm sense of happiness, when they were down (which happened often) I followed right along there. The characters themselves were so pathetic yet funny and inspiring. The movie overall was an odd, yet welcomed change to the normal star-gazer flick that is normal to opening night.

Tags: Australia, claymation, mary and max, opening night, park city, stop motion, sundance, utah

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