Adam Elliot: photo by Heath Missen.

by Simon Sellars

‘Questions for… Adam Elliot, Animator’. Originally published in A3, the Age newspaper, 3 Oct 2003.

Adam Elliot is being hailed as Australia’s most successful short filmmaker. His 23-minute claymation, Harvie Krumpet, won three of the four major prizes at Annecy, the world’s largest animation festival, and picked up Best Australian Short Award at the 2003 Melbourne International Film Festival.

You have a hereditary ‘shake’ that affects your entire nervous system. But don’t you need steady hands to be an animator?

I was born with a physiological tremor – everybody shakes but I do more than most. Because animation is all about intricacy, this means my models are bigger. They’re designed to make it a lot easier for me to move them. My condition has actually fed into my style – my characters look the way they do because of my disorder and it’s also why my drawings are wobbly, with very few straight lines.

Your subject matter is beyond the realm of most animation. Characters have thalidomide and cerebral palsy, and Harvie himself loses a testicle. What attracts you to underdogs?

I just find that animation tends to steer away from things that are too difficult, and I always want to make characters that audiences can really relate to. Like the next-door neighbour, or someone you might see on a tram – people we engage with on a daily basis. But I do get nervous. With Ruby [Harvie's daughter] and her thalidomide, I thought, ‘Am I going too far. Is it all for effect?’ But I always try and focus on the positive elements. With Ruby, the emphasis was that she was successful, that she had a great spirit and loved her father.

Your style is observational. How does that translate into a storyline?

I start off with a detail and work backwards. I say, in this film I want the character to have his testicle removed. That’s one ingredient. Another: he has to have a daughter with thalidomide. I want quotes in a film: how am I going to weave them in? It’s like a dinner party: I want all this stuff and can we mix it all together and is it going to work?

How do you construct your models?

Well, they’re about the size of a wine bottle. The arms are plasticine, the head and torso are made of car bog – the pink stuff panel beaters use – and the sets are wood. For Harvie we spent a lot of time at hardware and fabric shops. We had to think laterally. We’d get into the studio and realise we’ve got to make eight miniature wheelchairs. How? We used shopping-trolley wheels.

As a child you were very shy. Could this be why you are drawn to the solitary nature of animation?

Definitely. I don’t mind my own company, but there are times when it gets a bit lonely. A lot of people think animators are megalomaniacs and can’t collaborate, but I do like to work with people I think are inspirational.

Do you ever talk to your models?

Yes! Especially after 14 months of shooting. You get very stir crazy.

On a typical day, how much footage would you shoot?

For Harvie, it was three to five seconds a day. Some days we’d do a whole minute if we had a static shot – we’d just let the camera roll over.

Harvie contained around 280 cuts and took 14 months to shoot. Do you have the stamina to make a feature-length claymation?

I think so. I used to reckon half an hour was impossible but now I’ve done that I think maybe I could do a feature. Unfortunately, it would cost anywhere between 10 and 80 million dollars to make. It took Aardman 20 years before they made their first feature, Chicken Run, so I’m not in any hurry. To be quite honest, I’d be happy to just keep doing shorts. If I can survive and still move an audience with shorts then I’m happy with that.

Perhaps there’s a children’s book in you.

Actually, I’ve just finished a kids’ book. It took me eight years to write and it’s called The A to Z of Monsters. It rhymes, which is part of the reason why it took so long. We’re not sure what to do with it. One idea was to make it an animated series first and then turn it into a book. It’s probably a little dark for kids, but then I keep forgetting how sophisticated kids are these days. The other night I saw Pirates of the Caribbean and this little girl next to me said she only shut her eyes once. And I thought that film was very scary!