Mary and Max - review

The Australian stop-motion animator Adam Elliot, who won an Oscar for his 2004 short Harvie Krumpet , works laboriously with deliberately lumpy clay figures, and his first full-length film concerns two withdrawn pen pals who never meet. Mary (voiced by Toni Collette) is a slow-witted Australian from a Melbourne suburb, Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) an overweight Jewish New Yorker suffering from Asperger's syndrome, one of the symptoms of which is collecting his own toenails. It is a sad, whimsical, uncomfortably comic film, touching rather than tragic, and overlong. The sly commentary is spoken by Barry Humphries who knows a bit about the suburbs of Melbourne.