Review: Mary and Max

Crazy stop motion.

Submitted by Special Guest Reviewer- Tom!, 11/20/09 3:29 PM

Writer-director Adam Eliot’s Mary and Max chronicles the 20-year relationship between the shy and socially inept Mary Daisy Dinkle and the manic-depressive, obese Asperger-Syndrome-suffering Max Jerry Horowitz. One day Mary (voiced by Toni Collette), a friendless, ignored and neglected 8 year-old girl living in the town of Mount Waverly, Australia decides to write a letter to an American chosen randomly from a phonebook at the post office, in hopes of finding out where babies come from in America (in Australia, they are apparently found in mugs of beer). The recipient of her letter is Max (voiced by Phillip Seymour Hoffman), her 44 year-old cross-global spiritual companion in isolation and love of chocolate. Max lives alone the Bronx, can’t hold a job, struggles with his weight and life and a plethora of mental disorders and neuroses that cause him confusion and anxiety. Thus starts the long-standing friendship of Mary and Max, whose lives unfold through a series of letters recounting their daily experiences, deepest anxieties and fears, and misguided advice on love, bullies and dieting.

Stop motion has long been a favored medium of mine – the oft repeated line that it’s easier to connect to a film that bears the literal visible fingerprints of another human is a truism, for me. I love the tactility of it, the thousands of hours that have gone into creating the film, by hand, are so apparent on the screen that it carries a symbolic weight of authenticity not shared, for me, by digitally animated films. They’re more real, more human, less mediated, more direct and loved.

If stop motion is the home cooking of animation, Mary & Max is a small dinner party hosted by a 5-star chef. The mastery of the medium is apparent in the smallest detail of character, prop, and set design and in every nuance of motion. The main characters are clunky; Mary is short and stout with stubby arms and legs that cause her to waddle rather than walk. Normally an animator’s nightmare due to her limited range of motion, her design and movement express her character’s relationship with the world - awkward and out of place. The environments themselves are direct extensions of the characters – a red pom-pom Max receives from Mary is one of the rare splashes of color in the palette of grays that is New York. Mary lives in a sad, sepia toned world where seemingly all writing on packaging is done in childish scrawl similar to her own.

The film unfolds guided by an omniscient narrator and the voiced-over reading of letters by Mary and Max. Unfettered by much on-screen dialogue, the film is able to jump around temporally and spatially through actual and imagined events while guided by the narrator or the protagonists – reminiscent of the character introductions in Jeunet’s Amelie. Suited to the stream-of-consciousness letter writing style of a young girl and a manic man, the film moves through countless locations including a chocolate heaven, the bottom of the sea, a castle in Scotland and the moon. The accompanying visuals result in some of the funnier moments of the film when, for example, Max explains that in America babies come from eggs laid either by rabbis, nuns, or prostitutes (depending on the religious views of the parents), and the viewer is treated to as literal an accompanying image as one could hope for.

It was refreshing to see an animated film where the interplay between medium and message was so well thought out, and executed with such panache and precision. In the wake of a timely heated lecture (hardly a conversation due to the height of my soapbox) I recently delivered to Rajo on “The Deterioration of Story, Aesthetic, and Form by the Rise of Spectacle and Sensationalism in Feature Length Animation, or: Why 3D Can Suck a Nut”, Mary and Max effectively slapped down my complaints about cartoons and offered a much-needed breath of fresh air. Both comedic and tragic, dark and uplifting, this film is a delight – reminding me in style and tone of books like the Lemony Snicket series and Coraline. The rich and engaging protagonists live in a fantastic and expressionistic environment and are surrounded by an entertaining and wonderfully designed support cast – from Max’s near-blind neighbour Vera, to Mary’s alcoholic mother (described by Mary as “wobbly”), to an ill-fated and short-lived mime. The story weaves with childish wonder and delusional tangents through entertaining vignettes that ultimately express the characters and their experiences in a meaningful way. While it teeters on the line of over-sentimentality at times, it generally stays on the right side of the fence and keeps the more heart-wrenching scenes appropriately paced and muted. Unique in form, mature in storytelling, enchanting in design, the film expresses earnest human pathos while still being darkly hilarious; the best animated film I’ve seen in awhile. 8/10.

Editor’s Note: Mary and Max is playing this week in Toronto at the Bloor Cinema, and is available on several movie-on-demand cable services in the States.

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