Mary and Max

Mary and Max (2009) is about two pen friends. Mary is an eight year old girl in Melbourne; Max is a man in his forties in New York with Asperger's syndrome. Mary picks an address at random from a phone book and writes, and the correspondence lasts twenty years. Adam Elliot has said the film came out of his own life; he has had a pen friend in New York for over twenty years, and Max comes from that person. The scale of the production is large for claymation: 133 separate sets, 212 puppets and 475 miniature props, with principal photography running over 57 weeks. Designing and building one working typewriter took nine weeks. Toni Collette voices Mary, Philip Seymour Hoffman voices Max, and Barry Humphries narrates. It opened the Sundance Film Festival in 2009. Made for 8.2 million Australian dollars, it grossed 1.7 million worldwide and never received a general theatrical release in the United States. It won the Cristal at Annecy. It runs 92 minutes. Good for: animation for adults, stories about loneliness, and the handmade quality of clay. Less good for: this is not a children's film; depression, suicide and alcoholism are direct subjects. The palette is deliberately grubby and some passages are genuinely bleak. The ending does not console.