ADAM Elliot’s bittersweet Australian film Mary And Max (12A) opens the Four Of The Best season of Animation at City Screen, York, on Tuesday at 6.15pm.

Toni Collette, Philip Seymour Hoffman and Eric Bana provide the voices for this charming “claymation” comedy-drama set in 1976, when a neglected eight-year-old Melbourne girl named Mary Dinkle (Collette) is thumbing through a Manhattan phonebook, looking for a random name.

She lands on Max Horovitz (Seymour Hoffman), an overweight Jewish New Yorker with Asperger’s Syndrome. Mary writes to Max, Max writes back and so begins a 22-year pen-pal friendship between total strangers, both lonely and searching for fulfilment.

On November 28, Stéphane Aubier and Vincent Patar’s A Town Called Panic (PG) will be shown at 8.15pm. The co-directors transfer their mad animated comedy series from Belgian television to the big screen for a delightfully unsophisticated stop-motion adventure that follows the wild antics of an Indian, a cowboy and a horse.

Their journey will take them across frozen plains, into underwater worlds and even to the centre of the Earth, but no matter how far these plastic protagonists venture, their surreal story is grounded by Aubier and Patar’s enchantingly simple animation techniques.

A steamy night in Havana, Cuba, in 1948 is the setting for Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal’s Spanish film Chico & Rita (15) on December 7 at 6.15pm. That night Chico, a rising jazz pianist, is entranced by a beautiful young songbird named Rita, who turns out to be the key to his success and the girl of his dreams.

Before celebrated Spanish artist Mariscal’s simmering animated romance reaches its moving crescendo, Chico and Rita will fall in and out of love, find happiness together and fame apart, and complete an epic life journey of self-discovery.

The season ends on December 12 with the 8.15pm screening of Mamoru Oshii’s Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence (15). Nine years in the making, this 2004 Japanese work combines a variety of modern graphic techniques in a thriller where the line between humans and machines has been blurred almost beyond distinction.

In the year 2032, covert anti-terrorist detective Batou is investigating the case of a gynoid, a hyper-realistic sex robot who malfunctions and slaughters her owner. As Batou delves deeper, questions arise about humanity’s need to immortalise its image in dolls; the answers lead to the shocking truth behind the crime and maybe even the very meaning of life. For tickets, phone 0871 902 5726.

Competition

Courtesy of City Screen, York, York Twenty4Seven has two soundtrack sampler CDs for Chico & Rita to be won.

It features original tracks by Cuban pianist Bebo Valdes, on whose life Fernando Trueba and Javier Mariscal loosely based their film, along with performances by Idania Valdes and Rolando Luna and the Chico and Rita Madrid Band.

Question: Who directed the film Chico & Rita?

Send your answer with your name, address and daytime phone number, on a postcard, to Charles Hutchinson, Chico Competition, The Press, 76-86 Walmgate, York, YO1 9YN, by next Friday. Usual rules apply.