Mary And Max: Letter From An Unknown Woman

What a wonderful year it's been for stop-motion animation — not just high-profile releases like Coraline and Fantastic Mr. Fox, but smaller, even more idiosyncratic projects like A Town Called Panic and Mary and Max. I'm a little surprised, actually, that Mary and Max isn't more widely known — you'd think that with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Toni Collette, two actors who you'd think wouldn't normally deign to do animation, as the principal members of the voice cast, it would have a higher profile.

In any case, Mary and Max is the subject of my "Hidden Gem" DVD segment this week for CBC Radio; click here to listen to it. By the way, for those of you interested in Hidden Gem trivia, this is the third time in just four months that I've talked about a film featuring Barry Humphries — he starred in Shock Treatment, was one of the interviewees in Not Quite Hollywood, and he narrates Mary and Max. I don't know if there's any significance to that fact, but I figure if I don't make note of it, no one else will.