Mary and Max

This DVD was a gift from the inimitable Lisa Brown. It is a magnificent telling, via elaborate stop-motion animation, the strange true story of a lonely little girl in Australia who starts an unusual long-term friendship by writing a pen-pal letter to a random address in New York City, which turns out to be the apartment of a grown man, who lives alone, and struggles with a severe case of Asperger's syndrome. The story manages to be both charming and disturbing, as it probes the true nature of friendship, and what it is that we need from each other. I find myself very much haunted by it, as I think about my own strange hobbies, and the local and long-distance relationships in my own life.