Adam Elliot's follow-up to his short opus 'Harvie Krumpet' is a tour-de-force of jaw-dropping animation, heart-wrenching beauty and exquisite sadness. Ostensibly, it's a tale of friendship between two pen pals; Mary, a lonely eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year-old obese man living in New York and suffering from Asperger's syndrome. The depth of pathos in their quasi-romantic exchanges becomes unbearable at times, but the expertly nuanced narration always pulls you back from the edge of despair with its wry humanity.
As a Bristolian I find this hard, nay treacherous, to say, and I know that their target audiences are different, but this knocks the stuffing out of any of Aardman's features. Unmissable.