Mary and Max (Mary and Max)

Production and year: Australia, 2009 Genre: animation, drama, comedy Screenplay: Adam Elliot Director: Adam Elliot Music: Dale Cornelius Medical theme: Asperger's syndrome Description: "Mary and Max" is a uniquely crafted animated film about an extraordinary friendship between two people living on different continents. Mary is an eight-year-old Australian girl whose mundane daily life in the 1970s is filled with problems with her peers and parents. Her biggest problem is the lack of a friend, so one day she decides to pick a name at random from the phone book and write a letter to that person about herself, proposing friendship. As fate would have it, the girl chose Max, a New Yorker—an overweight middle-aged man—with whom, as it turned out, she had more in common than might have seemed at first glance. Their pen-pal friendship grows; the characters learn more and more about each other, describing the troubles they face in life, though some of Mary’s questions embarrass Max, even causing him anxiety or anger. It turns out that he is not an average person, but suffers from Asperger’s syndrome, which is the cause of his unexpected reactions. After one of the letters, the man ends up in a psychiatric hospital. However, this is not the end of their extraordinary story... This film is an animation made in a "plasticine" style, which further enhances the situational humor present in nearly every scene, even though the film deals with extremely serious issues. This allows us, however, to maintain a sense of distance from the events presented, which, if depicted realistically, would certainly be difficult to watch and very painful. These techniques thus facilitate the telling of this beautiful story, while still allowing us to reflect on the issue of Asperger’s syndrome.