Sloppy clash of moods, but it's genuinely touching at times and certainly worth a watch

Rating: 7/10 (7 February 2010)

An Australian stop-motion animated film about a dumpy little girl (voiced by Toni Collette) who randomly chooses a name in a New York phone book and writes him a letter. The man on the other side (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an obese, middle-aged Jew with Asperger's Syndrome. Neither of these people have friends in real life, and they soon become each other's only friends. This is a rather sad story, filmed in a very muted color scheme. The New York sequences, in particular, are almost black and white. The Australian sequences have a lot of brown in them. Writer/director Elliot (claiming he based it on a true story) injects a lot of quirky humor into the picture, almost making it seem like an Aardman product at times. The big difference between this and Aardman: the animators of Mary & Max go out of their way to make everything hideously ugly. There's a big mental disconnect between all of these elements. It wants to be depressing, it wants to be charming, it wants to be hilarious, it wants to be freakish. Fortunately, it does succeed enough of the time where it's well worth watching. At its heart, there's a very touching story. I do not think this deserves to be mentioned alongside the slew of wonderful animated films of the year, except maybe for a footnote.