Correspondence: "Mary and Max"

These are extraordinary times for animation - perhaps the strongest single year on record, across all forms of the medium. In the past few months alone, we've witnessed Toy Story 3, The Illusionist and A Town Called Panic, none of which required a 3D upgrade to be considered essential viewing. Try to think of three live-action features of a comparable wit and imagination released during that period, and I dare say you'd be stumped; perhaps we should do away with actors altogether, or at least reduce them to the standing of on-call voice artistes. To this elite sample, we can now add the Aussie claymation Mary and Max, from director Adam Elliot.

Elliot first came to prominence on these shores with the half-hour Harvie Krumpet, a truly touching work that won the short animation Oscar in 2004 before being released as part of the touring Model Behaviour programme. Though his creations are typically far less skeletal than Tim Burton's experiments in stopmotion (wide-eyed and only just on the cuddly side of grotesque, they instead resemble the offspring of Aardman's Rex the Runt and the Crazy Frog), Elliot shares with Burton a boy-in-his-bedroom's fascination with misfits and outsider figures - often lonely and hard done-by, who've known suffering and yet remain compelled by some force (whether their own will, or the animator's hand) to keep muddling through, to a usually bittersweet end.

For his first full-length feature, Elliot tells the tale of two such outsiders, and a 25-year friendship conducted entirely through the postal system. For Mary Daisy Dinkle, a bored, bullied eight-year-old living with an alcoholic mother and an ineffectual father in the drab, brown Australia of the 1970s, this correspondence marks the beginnings of a growing curiosity about what may be over the horizon. For Max Jerry Horowitz, the overweight, fortysomething New Yorker whose address Mary cribs from a post office phonebook one eventful afternoon, these letters are a way of communicating with an outside world he's always found disordered and terrifying - and Elliot duly renders Max's environs as a monochrome film noir set, all shadowy street corners, gunshots, and devouring dames (such as the lusty BBW in Max's Overeaters Anonymous meetings) whose appetites know no bounds.

To Max's Asperger's, the film adds agoraphobia, alienation, depression of various hues, shock therapy, low self-esteem and dismemberment, plus the spectacular demise of several goldfish - yet the clay makes all this business malleable, manageable; it never just sits there as a lump, and Elliot knows how to remove the hard edges from these themes without compromising the essential truth of who Mary Dinkle and Max Horowitz are. It's not an issue movie, but a vivid character study, and it's the details that get you. Where his stopmotion contemporary Nick Park has an obvious fondness for grand Heath Robinson designs, Elliot has a fetish for fixtures, those altogether tinier touches that bind the world together, and seem to signify a sort of making-do particular to these characters: crocodile clips employed to clamp the trouser-ends of an amputee, the pegs used to secure Mary's coat in the absence of any remaining buttons, the twin swinging drawstrings on Max's tracksuit bottoms. (In a film of outré professions, Mary's dad has the joyless task of attaching the strings on tea bags.)

It's self-evidently a work borne out of real love: as Park has ventured in interviews, you wouldn't spend your time working in claymation if you didn't absolutely care for these characters, their homes and preoccupations, and didn't want to nudge them forward, frame by frame, in the hope they might find happiness in their lives, or some kind of enlightenment. (You'd go into computer animation instead, which is so often careless and dashed-off, not to mention a good deal more financially profitable.) There's a real invention in the storytelling, too. When Max's numbers come up in the New York lottery, it makes perfect sense he should use the money to fill a lock-up garage with a lifetime's supply of cooking chocolate, so as not to disrupt the carefully maintained order of his life; a clever touch, too, that Mary should find herself devastated when the childhood sweetheart she marries takes up with a penpal of his own, not realising for a moment the hobby that has provided her with a liberation of sorts might also do the same for somebody else.

Elliot is alert to the deadening quality of political correctness - one of the tomes on Asperger's Mary comes to read, in the hope of understanding Max's condition, has the title Curing Mental Spasticity - and the pitfalls of unearned sentimentality. In a live-action movie on this subject - perhaps even a well-meaning American animation - the two outsiders would eventually meet and be united by their difference; in Elliot's vision, they encounter one another only belatedly, after finding they may just be too different for their communication to be entirely painless. (Believing Mary to have betrayed his confidences, Max rips the "M" key from his manual typewriter - another of the fixtures to have connected them over the years - and mails it to her in a box, like Gwyneth Paltrow's head in Seven.) A plasticine 84 Charing Cross Road, the film blends hurt and humanity in equal measure, never more so than in Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman's voicing of the title characters, and in Barry Humphries' beautifully weighted narration: nice one, chook.

Mary and Max opens in selected cinemas from Friday.