Great work!

Rating: 10/10 (11 February 2012)

The winner of the Ottawa Animation Festival grand prize, Mary and Max was created by the Australian animator Adam Elliot. The film is about a pen pal friendship between little Mary living in a small dusty provincial town near Melbourne with her alcoholic mother and a corpulent New Yorker, Max who is suffering from overeating and Asperger's syndrome.
The characters are made from clay that makes them look like those in Wollis&Gromit, but almost everything else around is monochromatic. Two depressive and bizarre worlds hopelessly lock characters inside, but to prevent you from having a panic attack the despair is balanced with just the right amount of black humor. This artistic work is very detailed; it's not like a usual cartoon approximation: everything that happens on the screen is precisely interpreted into a rich visual language.
Everyday routine like drinking cups full of sherry or stuffing dead birds found in the garden puzzles little girl, so one day she takes an arbitrary address from a phone book and writes a letter to other side of the Earth wondering if everything is the same over there. This is a story about naive attempts to comprehend the strange and chaotic outer world, made with good taste and a sense of harmony.
"Mary and Max" doesn't follow Hollywood strategy as, for example, "Rain Man" does. The protagonists do not reveal their hidden talents or defeat bad guys. They simply try to cope with routine problems and save their fragile relations. It's not likely that all people face such bizarre problems in everyday life, which Max does due to his disorder. But one can still encounter similar troubles; for example in the case of a sudden misunderstanding of the usual order of things, or a bitter quarrel without any reasonable cause.
The movie "Mary and Max" is like a friendly jest. It's easy to understand because everyone has some similar character traits, but it's still might be hard to accept such people as they are in everyday life.