Falling somewhere between Nick Parker’s charming “Wallace and Gromit” shorts and Tim Burton’s more adult stop-motion films, the 2009 Sundance hit “Mary and Max” is a hilarious and poignant tale about two very different people from separate sides of the world. Eight-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced as a child by Bethany Whitmore and as an adult by Toni Collette) has no friends in her hometown of Melbourne, Australia, so one day she randomly selects a name out of the United States phonebook and writes them a letter to ask where babies come from.
That person is Max Jerry Horowitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a 44-year-old overweight New Yorker who also has no friends apart from the imaginary one he created as a kid. Against his better judgment, Max decides to answer Mary’s question, thus jumpstarting a 20-year long pen-pal friendship that explores everything from love, religion, and even mental illness. Though the film is told in a storybook manner with narration by Barry Humphries, “Mary and Max” has some surprisingly mature messages at its core. Mary may only be a child, but that doesn’t stop Max from speaking bluntly, which as we later learn is a result of his Asperger’s Syndrome. Pretty heavy stuff for Claymation, but thanks to a wonderful script by director Adam Elliot and key performances from Whitmore and an unrecognizable Hoffman, this is one animated film that every adult fan of Pixar should rush out and see.
