12 Movies In The IMDB Top 250 You've Probably Never Seen
5. Mary And Max
Mary and Max can be described as a mixture of Aardman's stop-motion animation style and Pixar's storytelling. It's a movie with fart jokes and cute characters that kids can enjoy, but one that will also resonate with adults on a deeper level.
Mary (Toni Collette) is a lonely, friend-deprived eight-year-old girl living in Melbourne, Australia, who becomes pen-pals with Max (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a lonely, friend-deprived forty-four year-old who lives in New York.
It's a strange relationship but not one that heads in the direction you're expecting (your first reaction might be that Max has an indecent fixation on Mary but that's not the case).
Instead, Mary comes to confide in her unlikely new friend. She asks him where babies come from. She asks him to explain love. Mary views Max almost as a father, perhaps because her own biological father doesn't treat her like he should. The film speaks to real-life fathers and real-life families, while simultaneously being an enjoyable, simple animation, if that's all you want from it.
It may be a little too dark for younger children - check the content advisory beforehand - but if you have 90 minutes to kill and need something to watch, Mary and Max is worth seeking out.