Once in a while, a movie just stays with you.

Rating: 9/10 (26 April 2020)

Some movies are just special and a want to think carefully before I review them. I've known of this movie for ages without knowing any details. I'm always fascinated by animation that is neither the family movie idiom or its polar opposite (Like, you know, Family Guy of which I am actually a big fan).
Describing this movie is hard, but that's partly because it's intelligence lies in the simplicity its idea, though this is not really a simple movie.
It's tempting to say that it didn't need to be animated but a movie more than the logistics of its plot, this movie has a style and tonality all of its own which more than justifies the work needed to stop motion animate it like a vintage kids show as this movie embodies that part of all of us that still feels like a small child trying to understand a challenging world.
Always visually compelling, the narrator is agreeable enough but I can't help but feel that they over use him; several times in the story we can see quite clearly how capable the movie is of conveying the narrative visually but the overall picture feels simply like an audiobook that happens to be elaborately illustrated as we see the hypotheticals, fantasies and fears of the characters as they describe them to each other. But since the narrative is all about a penpal correspondence and thus very internal, they can sort of get away with this more than the average movie could and very little of it is objectionable anyway.
A grotesquely but still beautifully painted in muted colors and grotesquely charming (but usually just grotesque) visions of the human form that made me feel like I was witnessing the human race like an alien would; unbiased by any local standard of beauty. Mary's waddling walk and the cartoonish proportions of the characters combined with the stylized vision of the foreboding inner city and the stark antipodean suburbs give an effect that is at once naive and sophisticated somehow.
it's a dark vision of a seemingly hopeless world. Everyone is ugly and destruction is everywhere, especially of the self. It gets so relentlessly unfortunate that it becomes comical and then bursts out the other side and becomes just dark again.
I never knew what this movie would throw at me and I was figuratively brought to the edge of my seat at least once. The shameless use of scatological detail and crass jokes make this a movie that is not aspiring to any particular standard of beauty and the small lifeline at the centre of the picture of two individuals who despite everything found each is like nothing I've seen before in any artistic medium. It makes you feel like laughing, crying and low key recoiling and each turn leads seamlessly to the others.
It's abuse of the Penguin Cafe Orchestra notwithstanding, this movie had me in tears and punches home with a remarkable honesty and humility that people are all basically broken and although I have a couple of objection to where ended up considering what this movie puts you though, I walked away from this with a greater capacity for empathy than when I begun it.