It's a bit of an obvious statement at this point in film history that animation isn't just for kids anymore. From Fritz The Cat to last year's Waltz With Bashir, animation hasn't been the sole domain of wisecracking, family-friendly animals for a good long time. Still, given that more "adult" animation doesn't necessarily tear it up at the box office, there's a certain degree of fearlessness that goes into making a feature length animated film on more mature topics. Multiply that fearlessness by a factor of ten if you're making a full length claymation film about depression and loneliness. Multiply it by hundred if you're Director/writer Adam Elliot, and you actually make the whole thing work.

The Roald Dahl-esque Mary and Max paints two lost souls on opposite sides of the Earth who become unlikely friends. Mary Daisy Dinkle (Bethany Whitmore, then later Toni Collette) is an eight-year-old girl living in Australia (where everything is brown) with her monstrous mother and taxidermist father. At the post office one day, she randomly picks a name out of a New York phone book. That name is Max Jerry Horowitz (a vocally unrecognizable Philip Seymour Hoffman), an obese Jewish man with Aspergers, who lives in New York, where everything is black and white. They start writing each other, and continue to write each other throughout their lives, filling the role of, literally, the only friend each other has.

There are times when the film gets a little too precious for its own good, over describing a scene, or adding a few too many quirks. And at ninety minutes, the movie ends up with a little flab in the middle (not unlike Max!). This is to be expected, in certain sense, as Elliot has only previously worked on shorts, including the Oscar winning Harvie Krumpet. Adding an extra hour to his work means finding reasons to add the length, and he's not quite there yet.

Additionally, a particularly important sequence late in the film is almost knocked on its end by the unfortunate and blasting inclusion of "Que Sera Sera." Yes, yes. We know that "whatever will be will be," you don't need to sing it at us.

But these are very, very small criticisms on what is otherwise one of the more brilliant and emotionally affecting animated films to be released this year.

Mary and Max's road to friendship and acceptance of their lots in life isn't filled with easy answers: unlike most films, where friendship saves the day and everybody is awesome and happy, Max never loses the weight, and Mary never really escapes the shadow of her parents. The ending of the film in particular underlines this, showing that though there are no happy endings, there may be happy middles, as long as you can find a real connection with another person.

The animation also is unique to the form, effectively using color and the stiffness of Elliot's clay characters to create a world through narration and voiceover that never feels like an attempt to mimic reality, but rather to hold a mirror up to it. Think of Mary and Max not as an animated film, but a film that uses animation to tell its story. The distinction might seem meaningless; it's not. Mary and Max tells that story well enough that one reviewer was brought to tears not just when seeing the film, but when recounting plot points later on. Not me, though. It was some other reviewer. I'm tuff.