The comic highlight of this year’s Jewish Film Festival is “Mary and Max,” an Australian animated film for grown-ups. It’s inspired by an unlikely long-distance friendship between a young Australian girl and a middle aged Jewish New Yorker. 

The excellent claymation “Mary and Max” visually resembles “Wallace and Gromit” but from the first frames it is clear this salty, quirky, bitingly funny film is not for kids. It is, however, both hilarious and ultimately touching. Based on a real if unlikely friendship, a decades-long pen pal correspondence between a bright but lonely 8-year-old girl in Australia and an autistic, overweight 44-year-old Jewish man in New York City, “Mary and Max” uses off-beat humor to explore the questions of life and growing up, through both their letters and their lives.

This very original, appealing film was the focus of considerable critical attention and buzz in film circles last year, and this is its local debut, quite a scoop for the festival.

Barry Humphries narrates this dryly, humorous story like a children’s tale but with an adult, comic twist. Mary Daisy Dinkle, voiced by Bethany Whitmore and as she grows, by Toni Collette, is a curious, bright but lonely only child in a small Australian town. Mary tells us that her chain-smoking mother Vera has to keep sampling the cooking sherry to make sure it does not go bad. Vera also has a habit of shoplifting. Mary rarely sees her father, who spends his time in his workshop doing taxidermy. She has a pet rooster who fell off a truck on the way to the slaughterhouse, loves chocolate and sweetened condensed milk and watching a cartoon called the Noblets, because everyone is brown and has lots of friends. Her grandfather told her where babies come from – fathers find them at the bottom of beer glasses.

One day while looking through a copy of the New York phone book, Mary decides to write someone in America to ask if American babies came from the bottom of cola cans. She picks name and address of Max Horowitz at random, writes a letter and mails it with drawing of herself and a chocolate bar.

The Israeli-born Horowitz (voiced by Philip Seymour Hoffman) lives an equally isolated life in a New York apartment, where he attends meetings of Overeaters Anonymous, visits his psychiatrist and tends to his oddly named pets. Max does not like noise or most people, although he would like at least one friend. Like Mary, he loves chocolate and watching the Noblets cartoons because everything is predictable and orderly, and because everyone has lots of friends. When Max receives Mary’s letter, he thoughtfully and comically answers her questions.

Thus begins a 20-plus-year correspondence, during which Mary grows taller, Max grows wider and everything grows quirkier and funnier. Eric Bana does the voice of Mary’s neighbor Damien, with whom she becomes enamored. Life events both humorous and sad are told with a dry, Monty Python-esque, tongue-in-cheek tone.

Visually, “Mary and Max” is a delight. The claymation is very polished, adding visual humor to the narration’s comic bits. Nearly everything in Mary’s world is a shade of brown, her favorite color, but with splashes of red. Max’s world is black and white, reflecting his viewpoint, but also with touches of red.

The music, much of it operatic, is another wonderful aspect of this delightful film. While the film is darkly comic, it is also sweetly touching and filled with lessons about life and friendship.

“Mary and Max”

When: 5:30 p.m. June 15.

More info: Cliff Froehlich, Executive Director of Cinema St. Louis, presenter of the St. Louis International Film Festival, introduces the film.