Mary and Max is the film equivalent of an epistolary novel. It tells of an unusual friendship, spanning two continents and twenty years, between Mary Daisy Dinkle a young, awkward, friendless Australian girl living with a kleptomaniac, alcoholic, chain-smoking mother, and Max Jerry Horowitz, an overweight New Yorker with Asperger’s. The penpals’ friendship spans twenty years of pain, joy and sorrows, each becoming the other’s shoulder to lean and cry on in a world where a hundred things can go wrong and often do, and where life throws up often the comic and tragic in the same incident, just as it does in the real world.

The film’s exaggerated modelling of its characters conveys a multitude of emotions with surprising depth and memorability. Alternating between a cold, gray film noir New York and a sepia-toned Melbourne, the film sets convey the inner world of its sad yet funny characters with surprising effectiveness. Without a traditional score, the soundtrack’s eclectic music selections featuring such pieces as the Penguin Cafe Orchestra’s “Perpetuum Mobile” and Bert Kaempfert’s “Swinging Safari” fits the film like a glove.

Despite its late arrival on these shores, let me stress that Mary and Max was probably the finest animated film of the year 2009 and will be the finest animated film to show in Singapore this year. Recent years have shown a slew of satisfying animated features for adults such as Persepolis and Waltz with Bashir and this movie is a right movement in that direction.

This is a funny, tender and intolerably moving film that shows just how beautifully animation can tell a story and convey a palette of emotions that a live action film will find difficulty with. This reviewer is tempted to deem it an instant classic, for such was the extent that it moved him. It’s one of the rarest of films that creates not just characters, but living souls to look at. So vividly drawn and performed are its claymated leads, that their joys and sorrows, triumphs and tragedies, will become yours in the process of watching the film.

Do not be surprised if you leave the theatre feeling that you have known the two remarkable individuals of Mary Daisy Dinkle and Max Jerry Horowitz for your entire life, despite the 90 minutes you spent with them in the theatre.