Mary and Max

While perhaps it doesn't fully sustain its 90-odd-minute running time, Mary and Max is a moving celebration of oddness and friendship.

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.

Those adults brave enough to confront the perils of animation will be treated to a wise, visually unique, emotional gem of a film that will leave you wondering how two clay figures damn near broke your heart.

The universe that is inhabited by Mary and Max is breathtaking, and must have required years of painstaking attention to detail to forge.

"Mary and Max" dares to be equally funny and sad, making it as bittersweet as Max's favorite chocolate.

This clay animation feels as if it was written by the early Woody Allen. Actually the genius behind it is Adam Elliot, who wrote, designed and directed this eccentric, wryly funny story.

A deliciously sentimental film whose offbeat sensibility manages to keep it out of the realm of schmaltz.

Unapologetically bleak and delivered with dashes of sweetness and sharp wit, Mary and Max deserves notice for being such an unexpected change of pace.

Ultimately, Mary and Max is about correspondence and lack of correspondence, about how our images and fantasies about others fail to match up to what they are like, and about the constitutive gaps and misfirings in any communicational practice.