Mary and Max (2009)

There hasn’t been a more coherent, beautiful, and moving claymated film since the likes of Wallace and Gromit than the 2009 Australian feature length Mary and Max. The film tracks the unlikely friendship between two kindred souls separated by an ocean and a continent, as Mary, a young Australian girl, writes to Max Horowitz, a bumbling, socially awkward, middle aged Jewish hermit living in Manhattan and voiced perfectly by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Mary happens upon Max’s name in a phonebook one day in the post office, and decides to ask him where babies come from in America, as she’s been told that in Australia they’re discovered at the bottoms of beer glasses. The plot thus far may sound trite, or overly cute, but writer, director, and animator Adam Elliott takes the relationship between Mary and Max and explores the miserable depths of a neglectful childhood, alcoholism, depression, and anxiety. Elliott approaches claymation as if it's an extended commentary on reality, painting Max’s Manhattan in a desolate black and white and Mary’s South Pacific suburbia in a forsaken sepia. 

At a mere ninety minutes, the film captures an achingly human story in a heartfelt manner too absent in modern cinema. All the while, Elliott crafts a perfectly subtle alternate universe wherein characters are hilarious and gaudy without ever falling into caricature. Eric Bana voices the part of Mary’s neighborhood crush, Damian Popodopolous. Mary and Max ranks among the more moving films I’ve seen this year, and with its runtime, it would be criminal to avoid it any longer.