"Mary Dinkle's eyes were the color of muddy puddles; her birthmark, the color of poo."
So begins the charming, delightful, altogether irresistible Australian claymation movie "Mary and Max". In a way, the movie is a spiritual cousin to CIFF's other great animated movie this year, "My Dog Tulip": both are about lonely souls who find friendship in unexpected places.
Mary Dinkle is a lonely Australian girl who becomes penpals with Max Horovitz, an obese middle-aged New Yorker with Asperger's syndrome. The movie follows their two-decade friendship, and explores, as the movie's website helpfully tells us, such themes as "friendship, autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity, kleptomania, sexual differences, trust, copulating dogs, religious differences, agoraphobia, and much more."
And the voice cast is terrific! Toni Collette is Mary (eight-year-old Bethany Whitmore provides Mary's voice as a child); the incomparable Philip Seymour Hoffman is Max. And the movie's narrator is Barry Humphries - unfortunately not in his Dame Edna persona.
"Mary and Max" screens Saturday at the Plaza, at 7 pm.
