A must-see animation

Rating: 10/10 (31 January 2012)

It is interesting how animated features are mostly marked as 'children movies' – something that started a long time ago with the first animations in the early 20's. Due to this fact, we see that the mainstream animations are made only by big Hollywood studios aiming in particular the young audience. Sometimes we see a film like Up(2009) or Wall-e(2008) that are not exclusively for kids, but for adults as well. However, we rarely see a true adult animation like Persepolis(2007) or Silvain Chomet's The Triplets of Belleville (2003).
Mary and Max is one of those 'rare' animations. It tells the story about Mary, a girl neglected by her parents who is very lonely and doesn't have any friends. She then decides to choose randomly someone from New York to write a letter – she end up picking up Max's address. Max is a forty-something old obese man who is also lonely, sad, depressed and doesn't have any perspective on life. When he receives Mary's letter, he is enchanted by it and both start a friendship that lasts more than twenty years.
The story seems a bit silly, but the film story deals with a lot of deep issues such as anxiety, depression, suicide and even Asperger Syndrome - black-humor is also present. The main theme is, however, friendship and the film does a great work on it, being sometimes very sad or very touching and optimistic. In any moment the story or the characters fall into clichés.
The director also made an interesting use of colors - in the whole film, there are almost only two colors: brown and gray. They are used with the intention of being a metaphor of Mary and Max's vision of their own lives. Mary's life is brown because it is uninteresting and boring; Max's life is gray because it is depressing, sad and without any hope or perspective of getting better.
So, with no colored images and no happy characters, this is not the kind of movie to show to children – most of them wouldn't understand it. However, it isn't for all adults as well – this film require a more sensitive audience that is able to capture and understand the elements presented in the story and the meanings of it.
This is a must-see film for those who want to appreciate other styles of animation rather than just see the conventional ones.