Mary and Max

Mary and Max (2009) is an Australian stop-motion drama you can watch online on iFILM, directed by Adam Elliot with voice performances by Toni Collette and the late Philip Seymour Hoffman. Shot entirely in clay over six years of painstaking handcraft, the film follows two deeply lonely people who find each other by accident across twelve thousand miles of ocean.

Eight-year-old Mary Daisy Dinkle in suburban Melbourne sends a random letter to a stranger in New York — and back comes Max Jerry Horovitz, a 44-year-old man with severe obesity and Asperger's syndrome who struggles to read social cues but can recite every flavour in his local candy store from memory. What begins as curiosity becomes a correspondence spanning decades: through Mary's awkward adolescence, Max's psychiatric hospitalisations, a failed marriage, and the particular sorrow of wanting more from someone than they can give.

Elliot keeps the colour palette deliberately muted — grey-brown Melbourne, charcoal-grey Manhattan — so that small bursts of red hit like a gut punch. The film opened the 2009 Sundance Film Festival. It's the kind of animation that makes you laugh and then sits quietly in your chest for days afterwards. Stream Mary and Max (2009) online on iFILM.