Trivia / Mary and Max

• Billing Displacement: Toni Collette gets top billing for playing adult Mary despite only showing up during the final half-hour of the film. Barry Humphries (the narrator), Philip Seymour Hoffman (Max) and Bethany Whitmore (Young Mary) have more lines than she does, which also makes the latter an example as she's the only one of the aforementioned actors to not get top billing.
• Creator's Oddball: Distributor example. Out of the hundreds of films IFC Films has released, this is one of only three that's animated, the other two being Michel Gondry's Noam Chomsky interview/documentary Is The Man Who is Tall Happy? and the horror anthology Fear(s) of the Dark.
• Screwed by the Network: In the US, the distributor IFC Films chose to release it only in Los Angeles and various film festivals before giving it a Direct to Video release. That made an Oscar nomination all the more unlikely and indeed, it wasn't nominated. Although it didn't get much of a theatrical release in most countries in the first place, with its widest release being in Australia, playing at about 50 theaters; in fact, according to box office records, the only other countries where it went to theaters were France and Germany.
• Write Who You Know: As in all of Adam Elliot's films, the characters are mostly based on real people. Max, for example, is based on Elliot's pen pal of twenty plus years, who is also autistic (Elliot invited said pen pal to the premiere, but he declined).

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