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Top Critics (4)
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The mixture of artistic sophistication and emotional crudeness cancel each other out.
In a perverse and often immature way, it forthrightly deals with mature issues of love, friendship, forgiveness and mental health. It requires a mature audience, but an audience nonetheless.
Remarkable and poignant...
Clearly a labor of love, but one destined perhaps to be loved by a very select few.
Everyone and everything is bursting with a hyper-real life that is pitched perfectly to the tragi-comic tone of the story.
Animated indie explores unusual friendship, heavy themes.
Funny, poignant and moving, this quirky and clever film oozes heart and insights into human nature.
The themes are nicely complemented by Elliot's animation style, which is full of wonky cityscapes and misshapen characters, something that gives this oddball story a lovely, tactile, handcrafted feel.
Has charm, curiosity and heart in spades.
An unorthodox but unforgettable valentine to a friendship that blossoms between two lonely people.
While occasionally over-sentimental, this is a wonderfully unique film.
It's a 20-year story that absorbs and beguiles, despite the ugly subject matter.
Elliot is a talent eccentric enough to make Nick Park look like an office drone, and the serious sadness underpinning his vision only makes the humour work better.
Elliot's record of an unconventional friendship revels in grotesque detail and scatological humour, but yields unexpected depth and poignancy.
A very odd, very unlikely animated film from Australia that manages to be sickly-cute, alarmingly grotesque, and right-on at the same time -- often in the very same scene.
Up may be a really good film, but compared to Mary and Max it's an episode of Thundercats.
This tale of two outsiders is lovingly rendered in traditional claymation and Elliot's expressive creations are wonderfully brought to life by the talented voice cast...
An offbeat and charming animation that is destined to become a cult classic.
While perhaps it doesn't fully sustain its 90-odd-minute running time, Mary and Max is a moving celebration of oddness and friendship.
Too long and wretched for children (Max is obese, receives electric shock therapy, and lives a life of neurotic misery) and yet surely too "kooky" for any sane adult (irritatingly camp words such as "smudgling").
Mary and Max emerges as a tale that's both funny and sad, with Elliot's screenplay finding a perfect emotional pitch throughout.
It's what Pixar might come up with if their characters found themselves off the rails.
While Mary and Max gets a lot of things right, I think it gets the dynamics of friendship more right than everything else.
Mary and Max should now finally be included in the list of recent animated films that deal head-on with bleak adult themes and yet bring out a wide-eyed wonder in their imaginative aesthetic.
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