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Mary and Max poster

Mary and Max

2009 · Adam Elliot

For when you want a good cry that comes with laughs attached — a film about loneliness that leaves you feeling less alone. Cozy in texture, but it goes to genuinely dark places, so bring a little emotional room.

What it's about

A lonely eight-year-old girl in the Melbourne suburbs picks a name out of a New York phone book and writes a letter. The stranger who answers is Max, a forty-four-year-old man with Asperger's who loves chocolate and finds most people baffling. Their pen-pal friendship stretches across two decades and two hemispheres, carried entirely in letters — and it turns out to be the most important relationship in both their lives.

The experience

Deadpan funny and quietly devastating, often in the same minute — the jokes are morbid and scatological, and then a line lands that catches you completely off guard. It moves at the gentle pace of letters being written and read, and it earns real tears without ever begging for them.

Performances

Philip Seymour Hoffman voices Max almost unrecognizably, finding enormous tenderness in a flat, halting delivery — a whole inner life conveyed through dictated letters.

The craft

Handmade stop-motion clay animation five years in the making, with a strict color scheme: Mary's Australia in muddy sepia, Max's New York in charcoal grey, so every rare splash of red hits like a heartbeat. Every wrinkle, crumb, and raindrop is physically sculpted, and the density of visual gags rewards close watching on a good screen.

Why it matters

It opened Sundance in 2009 — a first for an animated film — and stands as proof that stop-motion animation can carry adult subjects like mental illness, isolation, and grief without losing its warmth.

Reception & legacy: how Mary and Max was received, argued over, and remembered →

Adam Elliot calls his work 'clayography' — clay animation as biography — and this feature, five years in the painstaking making, is its fullest expression: an epistolary friendship conducted across two decades and two hemispheres, between a lonely Melbourne schoolgirl and a middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger's, voiced with extraordinary tenderness by Philip Seymour Hoffman. Elliot, already an Oscar winner for the short Harvie Krumpet, built his two worlds in strict palettes — Mary's suburbs in muddy sepia browns, Max's Manhattan in charcoal greys — so that each splash of red registers like a heartbeat. The humour is scatological, morbid, and deadpan-Australian; the sorrow underneath it is genuine, drawn from Elliot's own decades-long correspondence with a pen pal in New York. It opened Sundance in 2009, the first animated film ever to do so, and took the Cristal at Annecy, yet barely saw theatrical release — surviving instead by word of mouth, passed hand to hand like the letters at its centre. Every prop, wrinkle, and teardrop was sculpted physically: no digital assistance, just plasticine, patience, and grief given thumbprints.

Lines of influence