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Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com
Mary and Max, a Claymation film by Academy Award-winning animator Adam Elliot (Harvie Krumpet), has just enough quirky oddity to distinguish it from Elliot's fiercest Claymation competitor, Aardman Animation (Wallace and Gromit). Mary and Max tells the story of a 20-year pen pal friendship between an 8-year-old Australian goth girl, Mary Daisy Dinkle (Toni Collette), and 44-year-old New Yorker Max Horowitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman). The film's humor throughout is rooted in a general malaise that afflicts both characters. Mary, who has an alcoholic mother, a dull father who works in a matchstick factory, and a grandfather who committed suicide by drinking ammonia, is quite fed up with her ensuing adolescence. Fortunately, she reaches to the right person, an agoraphobic man with Asperger's syndrome who wants friends but has no clue how to acquire them. As the story progresses, years lapse and the two learn to rely on each other in more intimate ways until conflicts arise that add tension to an already-packed narrative. The animation style, done mostly in a gray to black palette with an overall droopy look, enhances the melancholic feeling that exudes from this intriguing story. Funny details, too, make it suitable for kids, such as Max's never-ending passion for chocolate hot dogs. While the letters are shared with the viewer, read aloud by either Mary or Max, one discovers universal anxieties and how they can be remedied through friendship. When Mary asks, "Have you ever been teased?" Max has pages to draft on this topic. Mary and Max is a uniquely bittersweet film starring two clay-sculpted outcasts that leaves one hoping for a sequel. --Trinie Dalton
Product Description
From Academy Awardr winning writer/director Adam Elliot and producer Melanie Coombs (Harvie Krumpet) comes the hilarious and moving new 'claymated' feature film about the pen-pal relationship between two very different people: Mary Daisy Dinkle (voiced by Oscarr nominee Toni Collette) is a lonely 8-year-old in the suburbs of Melbourne, Australia. Max Jerry Horovitz (Oscarr winner Philip Seymour Hoffman) is an obese 44-year-old with Asperger's Syndrome living in the chaos of New York City. Over the course of 20 years and 2 continents, their unusual journey of friendship will explore autism, taxidermy, alcoholism, where babies come from, kleptomania, sexual differences, trust, copulating dogs, religious differences, agoraphobia and more of life's big and little surprises.
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
46 of 49 people found the following review helpful
Unique, unsettling, but also quite moving - based on a true story about an unlikely friendship
December 10, 2009
Format:Blu-ray
Mary and Max is an independent claymation flick from Australia, with a darkly comic theme about a lonely and misunderstood 8-year-old girl who strikes up an unlikely and disturbing correspondence and friendship with a 48-year-old overweight depressive male diagnosed with Asperger's syndrome. While that sounds unlikely enough as a topic for an animated film, what was truly unexpected was the moving power of its simple message, achieved without resorting to sentimentalism or cliche.
The film, apparently based on a true story, plays like Wallace and Gromit conceived by Oliver Sacks and imagined by David Lynch and Robert Crumb. The animated characters, who tend to be overweight with exaggerated melancholy expressions, are nevertheless enormously expressive - and the film seamlessly shifts from the muted colors of the rundown Australian suburb where Mary lives to the expressive black and white of Max's New York City.
Mary (Toni Collette) is a curious and lonely girl, whose father is unavailable and whose mother is an alcoholic kleptomaniac and whose neighbors are each in their own way inscrutable. Confronted by questions the adults around her are unwilling to answer, she selects Max's name at random from an American phonebook and writes an inquisitive letter to a complete stranger. Initially thrown for a loop by this unexpected query, Max detects a kindred spirit and responds to her letter with complete sincerity. So begins a peculiar correspondence, fraught throughout with misunderstanding but culminating in a lifelong friendship that is able to carry them both through a great deal of personal misfortune and tragedy.
The voice of Phillip Seymour Hoffman invests the character of Max with a deeply sincere confusion about the peculiar games that people play. A card carrying communist and atheist, he nevertheless wears the skullcap he wore as a child, when his mother taught him babies came from egg-laying rabbis. He is honest to a fault, incapable of saying the kinds of things people like to hear; his imaginary friend, a psychiatrist by the name of Mr. Ravioli, stopped speaking to him after his real psychiatrist convinced him he was no longer necessary.
Mary and Max was dark and tender and strange and disconcerting and lovely. Its simple theme, conveyed lightly and through dark circumstance, is captured in a concluding quotation by Ethel Mumford: "God gave us relatives. Thank God we can choose our friends."
The film, apparently based on a true story, plays like Wallace and Gromit conceived by Oliver Sacks and imagined by David Lynch and Robert Crumb. The animated characters, who tend to be overweight with exaggerated melancholy expressions, are nevertheless enormously expressive - and the film seamlessly shifts from the muted colors of the rundown Australian suburb where Mary lives to the expressive black and white of Max's New York City.
Mary (Toni Collette) is a curious and lonely girl, whose father is unavailable and whose mother is an alcoholic kleptomaniac and whose neighbors are each in their own way inscrutable. Confronted by questions the adults around her are unwilling to answer, she selects Max's name at random from an American phonebook and writes an inquisitive letter to a complete stranger. Initially thrown for a loop by this unexpected query, Max detects a kindred spirit and responds to her letter with complete sincerity. So begins a peculiar correspondence, fraught throughout with misunderstanding but culminating in a lifelong friendship that is able to carry them both through a great deal of personal misfortune and tragedy.
The voice of Phillip Seymour Hoffman invests the character of Max with a deeply sincere confusion about the peculiar games that people play. A card carrying communist and atheist, he nevertheless wears the skullcap he wore as a child, when his mother taught him babies came from egg-laying rabbis. He is honest to a fault, incapable of saying the kinds of things people like to hear; his imaginary friend, a psychiatrist by the name of Mr. Ravioli, stopped speaking to him after his real psychiatrist convinced him he was no longer necessary.
Mary and Max was dark and tender and strange and disconcerting and lovely. Its simple theme, conveyed lightly and through dark circumstance, is captured in a concluding quotation by Ethel Mumford: "God gave us relatives. Thank God we can choose our friends."
25 of 25 people found the following review helpful
Format:DVD
One thing animation does very well is give us great art. But what it rarely does is actually create realistic human characters with all their inconvenient imperfections. This movie does both...and I consider "Mary and Max" one of the most daring films of 2009.
Those familiar with the animator - Adam Elliot - may recall he won an Oscar for "Harvie Krumpet" in the category of
short animated films. This film is his major oevre, an expanded version of the shorter film, albeit with different characters.
Ostensibly, the story is about a friendship between two unlikely partners. Max is an overweight, depressed, New York Jew suffering from serious mental illness. Mary is 8 years old, chubby, and confused. Both are lonely and underappreciated...and through the chance occurrence of a letter from Mary to Max, they develop a deep and real
friendship as pen pals.
Now, in many respects, both characters are very flawed human beings. And that is what makes the film remarkable. So many animated films from Finding Nemo to Beauty and the Beast end with a successful quest of the hero and heroine. This storyline is far more subtle. Both Mary and Max battle the everyday troubles of modern life - finding a way to fit in a world when they don't fit in at all. Searching for an influence on this movie in the history of cinema, I might select the Oscar best picture "Marty" which filmed a love affair between two ordinary people in the 1950's.
I cannot finish the review without saying something about the extraordinary recreation of New York City in ClayMation. I rather liked the fact the film uses claymation for the characters because it renders them far more "earthy" than the bright, digital CGI formula so popular today.
This is a film with dark moments and tender moments and annoying moments...in sum a film about life as it is really lived.
Those familiar with the animator - Adam Elliot - may recall he won an Oscar for "Harvie Krumpet" in the category of
short animated films. This film is his major oevre, an expanded version of the shorter film, albeit with different characters.
Ostensibly, the story is about a friendship between two unlikely partners. Max is an overweight, depressed, New York Jew suffering from serious mental illness. Mary is 8 years old, chubby, and confused. Both are lonely and underappreciated...and through the chance occurrence of a letter from Mary to Max, they develop a deep and real
friendship as pen pals.
Now, in many respects, both characters are very flawed human beings. And that is what makes the film remarkable. So many animated films from Finding Nemo to Beauty and the Beast end with a successful quest of the hero and heroine. This storyline is far more subtle. Both Mary and Max battle the everyday troubles of modern life - finding a way to fit in a world when they don't fit in at all. Searching for an influence on this movie in the history of cinema, I might select the Oscar best picture "Marty" which filmed a love affair between two ordinary people in the 1950's.
I cannot finish the review without saying something about the extraordinary recreation of New York City in ClayMation. I rather liked the fact the film uses claymation for the characters because it renders them far more "earthy" than the bright, digital CGI formula so popular today.
This is a film with dark moments and tender moments and annoying moments...in sum a film about life as it is really lived.
19 of 20 people found the following review helpful
Format:Blu-ray
From Academy Award-winning Australian director Adam Elliot, maker of the wonderfully weird and demented Harvie Krumpet (Best Animated Short, 2004 -- you can see it on YouTube), comes another equally weird and demented new animation called "Mary and Max". His work is not very well known in the US, but it's fantastic and should be more widely seen by fans of animation and dark, morbid humor.
It is the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between a chubby, homely, and socially maladjusted 8 year old girl in Melbourne, Australia named Mary Daisy Dinkle and a severely overweight and neurotic middle-aged Russian-Jewish man in New York with Asperger syndrome, named Max Jerry Horowitz. Mary has no friends and is taken care of by her alcoholic and kleptomaniac mother. On a chance visit to the post office, she finds an American phonebook and decides to write to someone to ask where babies come from while her mother tries to steal boxes of envelopes. The name she randomly chose was Max's, whom she sends a letter and a candy bar. They share a love for chocolate, a Smurfs-like show called The Noblets, and a need for friendship. In each other, they find kindred spirits and what follows is two decades of humorous correspondence and weird gift exchanges.
Voiced by an almost unrecognizable Phillip Seymour Hoffman, he plays the part of Max perfectly. There are no words to convey the frequency and weirdness of the deadpan humor. You'll just have to watch it. Literally every minute or two is filled with some weird joke, dialog, or visual gag. Owing to Max's autism, there's a lot of random humor and non sequiturs. This is probably the only animation where you'll see a "feline rectal thermometer" or learn that "turtles can breathe through their anuses" (which is actually true).
The film is wonderfully stylish and richly detailed. The film takes place between the 1970's and 1990's and is full of nostalgic images from that time, with some very nice modeling of a grimy New York City. Visually, everything in Mary's world is monochromatic brown, and everything in Max's is black and white, punctuated by spots of color like in Sin City. It deals with loneliness, depression, atheism, and above all, friendship.
Lastly, I need to mention that this is DEFINITELY not one for the kids, if you are expecting wholesome family entertainment like Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection [Blu-ray]. The film is filled with abundant adult-themed humor, numerous sexual references, as well as instances of cartoony nudity. It is dialog driven and likely to bore them anyway. Well worth seeing if you like dark and quirky humor.
It is the story of an unlikely friendship that develops between a chubby, homely, and socially maladjusted 8 year old girl in Melbourne, Australia named Mary Daisy Dinkle and a severely overweight and neurotic middle-aged Russian-Jewish man in New York with Asperger syndrome, named Max Jerry Horowitz. Mary has no friends and is taken care of by her alcoholic and kleptomaniac mother. On a chance visit to the post office, she finds an American phonebook and decides to write to someone to ask where babies come from while her mother tries to steal boxes of envelopes. The name she randomly chose was Max's, whom she sends a letter and a candy bar. They share a love for chocolate, a Smurfs-like show called The Noblets, and a need for friendship. In each other, they find kindred spirits and what follows is two decades of humorous correspondence and weird gift exchanges.
Voiced by an almost unrecognizable Phillip Seymour Hoffman, he plays the part of Max perfectly. There are no words to convey the frequency and weirdness of the deadpan humor. You'll just have to watch it. Literally every minute or two is filled with some weird joke, dialog, or visual gag. Owing to Max's autism, there's a lot of random humor and non sequiturs. This is probably the only animation where you'll see a "feline rectal thermometer" or learn that "turtles can breathe through their anuses" (which is actually true).
The film is wonderfully stylish and richly detailed. The film takes place between the 1970's and 1990's and is full of nostalgic images from that time, with some very nice modeling of a grimy New York City. Visually, everything in Mary's world is monochromatic brown, and everything in Max's is black and white, punctuated by spots of color like in Sin City. It deals with loneliness, depression, atheism, and above all, friendship.
Lastly, I need to mention that this is DEFINITELY not one for the kids, if you are expecting wholesome family entertainment like Wallace & Gromit: The Complete Collection [Blu-ray]. The film is filled with abundant adult-themed humor, numerous sexual references, as well as instances of cartoony nudity. It is dialog driven and likely to bore them anyway. Well worth seeing if you like dark and quirky humor.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Surprising and Stunning
Mary & Max took me completely by surprise. Given the aesthetic of the film and the comical tone, I was prepared for another quant little claymation film. Read more
Published 15 days ago by Ian Martin
Quite Odd, Yet, Absolutely Moving!
When I first selected to watch Mary and Max on Netflix I thought I was going to be watching a children's animation. Read more
Published 20 days ago by Shahreen Sultana
Editorial Review is Wrong
I loved this film, which I don't think is appropriate for children, due to some of the darker aspects of the film. Read more
Published 1 month ago by Delin Colon
Watch this movie!!!
Great Movie! Love it!! Thought that it was very compelling and had such a great human story to it. It also is very well made and is super funny. Read more
Published 3 months ago by MadisonAve.
Couldn't Finish
I was convinced by the great reviews that this would be an enjoyable film. However, I connected with nothing. Read more
Published 3 months ago by SanDiegoJesse
Wonderful, Wonderful Claymation Movie
Oh my. What can I say? I just saw this movie on the Sundance channel, and now I have to own it.
I didn't know what to expect. I had never heard of this movie before. Read more
I didn't know what to expect. I had never heard of this movie before. Read more
Published 4 months ago by coffeebrain
The best claymation film ----EVER!!!!
Mary & Max is the story of an unlikely friendship of two seemingly lost souls.
Mary Daisy Dinkle is an optimistic 8 year old living in Australia. Read more
Mary Daisy Dinkle is an optimistic 8 year old living in Australia. Read more
Published 4 months ago by Mark Durand
Beautiful Movie
I absolutely love this movie. I'm not the type to watch movies over and over again but I've not only seen this movie almost a dozen times, I've also made all my friends watch it... Read more
Published 4 months ago by Wera Yan
Loved this movie!
This film was so interesting I had my college class view it. It made for great discussion and debate... a must see!
Published 4 months ago by S. Dillon
Yes, it's dark.
It's dark humor. Let's toss that out there. If you don't like dark humor, move on. This is dark and quirky. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Stella
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