Mary Daisy Dinkle (Toni Collette) is an 8-year-old girl living in Australia with her drunken mother and taxidermy obsessed father.  One day she decides by random selection to mail Max Jerry Horovitz (Phillip Seymour Hoffman), an obese man living in Ney York that suffers from an inability to discern subtlety (i.e. Asperger’a Syndrome), and they become pen pals.  The film follows their 20-year relationship through postage and their lives over that time.

This is a stop-motion film from Australia about these two individuals who randomly become their own best friends and the ups and downs that come with a relationship like this.  I find it interesting that somehow people are able to be so frank about themselves and their feelings in such a distant scenario.  It’s easy to assume that people would be less personal and more superficial with their conversations.  However, over this medium where it took a week (sometimes more) for everyone to get a reply I find that people are willing to delve into their personal experiences so fluently.  I guess the truth of the matter is that in order for relationships, like this one, to flourish one must be open from the get go about yourself and that’s what made this story so special for me.

While I was watching this movie I found myself wondering what if this film were set in 2010?  In a world where twitter, facebook and myspace available to Mary as well as Max I wonder how different their lives would have been.  Would they still suffer from a deep dark depression based on their lack of friends?  Would they have have even met and interacted at all?  It’s an interesting thought.

The truth of the matter is that no matter how you look at it this is a fantastic movie.  It begins with a simple premise of a young girl in Australia reaching out for some form of friendly interaction with this forty-four year old man in New York.  Eventually they become the best of friends and along with a narrator (Barry Humphries) that made me feel like he was reading me a bedtime story that I was never able to shut my eyes to due to how interesting it was.  It’s thanks to the narrator that I began to realise exactly why the filmmakers decided to make this story into a stop-motion film.  The claymation made the movie feel more like we were shown some illustrations of these characters, like in a story book, and were imagining the inbetween actions that were being animated for us on screen.  It fit the story perfectly.

If you’re into stories that are centred around how people interact then this is definitely for you.  Even though it’s an animated film I can suggest not having the children around since the movie contains a small amount of graphic language and a few odd depictions of things like prostitutes laying eggs and babies coming out of glasses of beer.

VERDICT? RENT IT AT LEAST.

IMDB says 8.3/10

Rotten Tomatoes says 91%

I say 8.5/10