Two things you need to know about this offering from the Oscar-winning Australian director Adam Elliot. One: apart from Pixar�s Up, it�s probably the best animated film you�ll see this year. Two: featuring subjects such as mental disability, loneliness and suicide, it�s definitely not for children.

Mary and Max
****
Dir: Adam Elliot
Voices: Philip Seymour Hoffman, Toni Collette, Barry Humphries

Two things you need to know about this offering from the Oscar-winning Australian director Adam Elliot. One: apart from Pixar's Up, it's probably the best animated film you'll see this year. Two: featuring subjects such as mental disability, loneliness and suicide, it's definitely not for children.

It's Australia, 1976, and a little girl named Mary Daisy Dinkle is in the post office, flicking through international phone books and wondering if folk in other countries believe that babies come from the bottom of beer glasses, as her grandpa says.

Why not select a pen-pal at random, she thinks, and ask them. So begins decades of correspondence between the Aussie innocent (voiced by Toni Collette) and fiftysomething New Yorker Max Jerry Horovitz (Philip Seymour Hoffman).

Turn those alarm bells off now: Mary and Max might be darker than the bottom of the ocean at times, but it's also unfailingly sweet and marvellously uplifting. Allied to the sumptuous stop-motion animation is a wickedly wry narration by Barry Humphries. Possibly too bold to win Elliot another Oscar, but it deserves one just the same.

Saturday, 8pm, Sunday, 4.45pm, Cameo.