I realise that my District 9 review read like a rigid English essay...I'm gonna go ahead and blame that on ten different English teachers over the years, forcing me to write in a structured, formal style... Well I don't like that, so I'll try my best to be a bit more laxed from now on...
You probably haven't heard of this film. It's an Australian claymated feature from a man named Adam Elliot, who has seemingly only been involved with animated short films prior to this. One of these films, Harvie Krumpet (which won the Academy Award for Animated Short Film in 2003), appears to have inspired Mary and Max. Similarities can be noticed, and some small things appear to have been intentionally carried over for those who pay attention, such as the book round Max's neck, which has the title "Faces" (Harvie Krumpet has a matching book reading "Fakts"). You can watch Harvie Krumpet on YouTube here - it's a great little film (a bit over 20 minutes long) that details the seemingly unending amount of misfortune in Krumpet's life. While, as I mentioned, there are some similarities between Harvie Krumpet and Mary and Max - they are only few, and don't impend on either's success as a stand-alone film, or make it seem that you're watching the same thing again.
And I've written all of that without mentioning what the film is actually about. In a nutshell, in what the opening states is a true story, we follow an exchange of letters between an overweight man with Asperger's syndrome who lives in New York (Max), and a lonely young girl in Australia who is bullied at school (Mary - if you couldn't guess). We switch back and forth between their lives and are witness to the events in them. That's it! I can't make it sound any more exciting without ruining anything, and I don't want to do that...
I was very lucky to catch Mary and Max at a one-off screening, and unfortunately, it doesn't look like the movie is going to see a general release in the UK anytime soon (however much it should). My "viewing experience" wasn't off to a good start...I missed the first minute or so, as it took me a while to find the cinema. My penance for this was: receiving a glare from the man I had to ask to move so I could get to my seat, knocking the person in front of him's head in my rush to stop being such an annoyance to him, receiving a glare from them also, and finally I was fortunate enough to get a loud TUT from the people behind me during the 1 second that I was in their way before sitting down. I can't say I'd have a very different reaction if I was in their position; I understand the need to be fully immersed in a film - but boy the British really do need to relax. I was in front of the screen for seconds! Possibly less than that. Anyway, these "troubles" were quickly forgotten - the film is immediately likeable.
The animation is part of the reason for this - it's got a fantastic style, and the character design is reason to smile in itself. I adore stop-motion animation, and there really isn't enough of it around (the only other film I've seen this year utilising the technique was Coraline, which was also brilliant). In fact, I think Wallace & Gromit, Chicken Run, James and the Giant Peach and The Nightmare Before Christmas pretty much sum up the rest of the feature-length stop-motion films I've seen. Mary and Max uses the method to great charm and comic effect. All the exaggerated expressions and such that you'd expect from a cartoon are present. It's an original style too; the characters are small and compact yet have enormous detail.
The other thing that makes the film so enjoyable, is the dialogue, a lot of which is provided via narration by Barry Humphries (Dame Edna). He describes the out of the ordinary things that happen in such a matter-of-fact manner that you can't help but laugh. It's a perfectly-suited narration that ties the film together nicely. The rest of the dialogue is primarily delivered by Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Mary (Bethany Whitmore as a child, Toni Collette as an adult) themselves. Max is interested in a variety of eclectic things, and due to his Asperger's syndrome, finds it difficult to understand non-verbal expression in other people. He also takes everything literally; a woman at the doctor's surgery tells him to "take a seat" - he takes one of the chairs home with him. Needless to say, some of the things Max comes out with are equally hilarious ("Did you know that turtles can breathe through their anuses?" he asks the eight-year old Mary). Mary shares this child-like innocence (well...she is a child for most of the film), and in this way you can really care both for the characters themselves, and the bond between them. The voice-acting is superb throughout - every voice matches every face. I was particularly fond of Philip Seymour Hoffman's performance; after watching, it's hard to imagine any other type of voice come out of Max's character model.
There is a LOT of humour in the film, and most of it is, when it's not laugh-out-loud funny, a joy to watch ("Mr. Ravioli" is genius - you'll understand if you see it). Mary and Max is not entirely a bundle of laughs, though. While some may be quick to label it a children's film simply due to the animation style, they would be wrong. The film deals with themes like suicide, general death (of pets and relatives), Asperger's syndrome (of course), etc. There's not much that's really going to upset kids watching it, it's just that some of the subject matter will be a little beyond them. What the presence of these issues does is add a layer of depth and seriousness to an already spectacular film (I'm running out of positive adjectives). While the animation itself seems to be cartoony and quirky, the colour palette seems to reflect the darker moments of the film - Max's New York is a smokey black and white mass of buildings and fumes, and Mary's Australia, while using colour, consists of muddy browns and oranges.
My only slight gripe with the film is that it seemed to end rather abruptly - I was expecting rather a bit more. However, this isn't much of a complaint; I probably just wanted to watch more of such a marvelous film.
I've probably failed in my mission to make this a more informal review than my District 9 one. Doesn't matter. All you need to know is that Mary and Max is a touching, beautiful (visually and internally) movie that should move you and brighten your day. I have no idea if it'll be showing anywhere else in the UK or get a DVD release here, but the DVD and blu-ray come out on the 21st October in Australia, and in my humble opinion, it'd be well worth importing one.
9/10
Watch the trailer here. It has mildly annoying French subtitles, and it doesn't really do the film justice...it just seems like random clips stuck together. But hopefully you should get a feel for it. The clarity of that HD makes me want that blu-ray oh so much...
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