Taking man's inhumanity to man as its central theme, 'Au Hasard Balthazar' traces the life of a donkey, christened Balthazar by a group of young children, from birth to death. Balthazar's story begins on a small farm in a rural district of France. Throughout his life he is owned by many of the locals, returning to some of them more than once, and is set various tasks, from drawing a carriage to performing in a circus, turning a grindstone to acting as a smuggler's means of transport. Some owners find out more...

Adam Elliot's follow-up to his short opus 'Harvie Krumpet' is a tour-de-force of jaw-dropping animation, heart-wrenching beauty and exquisite sadness. Ostensibly, it's a tale of friendship between two pen pals; Mary, a lonely eight-year-old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year-old obese man living in New York and suffering from Asperger's syndrome. The depth of pathos in their quasi-romantic exchanges becomes unbearable at times, but the expertly nuanced narrati find out more...