Critical Perspectives poster

I decided to write my essay on the 2009 film Mary and Max, since it's one of the few places I've seen my medium, animation, and an important part of my identity, Asperger's Syndrome, intersect, and I feel it would help my practice to analyse it in detail. The poster consists of a still from the film I captured myself using VLC Media Player, a wallpaper pattern from the film that I took from hdbitz.org and made as seamless as possible using a program called Paint Shop Pro 9, the film's logo (taken from the DVD cover on amazon.co.uk) and 314 words written in the voice of one of the title characters of the film, printed out and stuck onto the still/wallpaper combination. I chose to print the text onto ordinary printer paper and the logo onto Bristol board and physically stick them onto the poster (which is printed on fine grain artist paper) rather than compositing it digitally, since the film itself uses a very "hand-made" aesthetic. Click Read More to read the text if you're having trouble making it out.

Dear friends in Critical Perspectives,

Thank you for the set title of the 1200-word essay which I am required to write as a first-year student at the University of the West of England:

“Present a detailed, critical analysis of a cultural text.”

Since I am an animation student, I feel it would be beneficial to my practice and future career for me to analyse a text made in my chosen medium, and I have selected Australian director Adam Elliot's 2009 stop motion film

Mary and Max

as my cultural text to analyse. I have a thing called “Asperger's Syndrome,” which is represented in a fair number of live-action films, but Mary and Max is the first and only animated motion picture I have encountered whose protagonist is on the autistic spectrum; since I am interested in how this important aspect of my identity may intersect with my work as an animator and/or film maker, I will be focusing on

the representation of Asperger's Syndrome in the film, with a particular interest in the advantages and disadvantages animation, as opposed to live-action, has in depicting this often-misunderstood condition.

I will be analysing the film (or rather, a few key scenes that deal either implicitly or explicitly with the character of Max Horowitz's Asperger's Syndrome) through the lens of my own personal experiences (while considering that as a Christian-born woman in the 21^st century as opposed to a Jewish-born man in the 1970s, my experiences will differ from those of the character), as well as George Gerbner's “symbolic annihilation” concept: I feel that the film successfully avoids all three strategies of symbolic violence outlined by Gaye Tuchman (omission, condemnation and trivialization) in its representation of individuals with Asperger's Syndrome, and I intend to explore how and why it achieves this.

Your friend in

BA (Hons) Animation Level 1,

Katherine Anne Sugrue

P.S.: it is pronounced “soo-groo”