The story of Grace Pudel is incredibly sad. One calamity after the other. Her mother dies, then her father becomes an alcoholic. Grace is bullied at school, and only her brother Gilbert stands by her, but when their father also dies, the two children, who were each other’s worlds, are separated. While Grace grows up with a disinterested nudist couple who try to heal their troubles with self-help books, Gilbert goes to the other end of Australia to an evangelical farmer family and has to work in apple production all day. And so it continues. Grace sinks into depression and begins to hoard snails and guinea pigs, and Gilbert becomes a lonely punk.

Adam Elliott, the director of MARY & MAX (200), looks straight at the hell of poverty, loneliness, neglect, and mental distress in his animated films. But he does so with such love for his clay figures and with so much bitter, absurd, resistant humor, that it’s a joy to watch how they – defiant, imperfect, handicapped – get through life. And like Mary before, he doesn’t allow for Grace to be entirely alone. Mary found a best pen pal in New York by accident in the form of autistic Max, and Grace meets old woman Pinky in the library, who has already tried it all in life and gets the young woman out of her snail shell.

Elliot has been working on his new animated film for ten years, and this is especially evident in the fantastically meticulously crafted backgrounds and the wealth of details that make multiple viewings practically a must. Just one of them: the cruel tinfoil hat Christians stick little magnets on poor Gilbert as therapy, which then reappear in every scene and tell their own story about how Gilbert's relationship with "Team Jesus" increasingly escalates.

Translation: Elinor Lewy