Today we have another Sundance trailer making its way across the interwebs. This one is for a stop-motion animation film, which doesn't usually grab a lot of attention at the fest, or at least enough to make waves outside of the festival itself.

Mary and Max features the voices of Toni Collette as Mary and Philip Seymour Hoffman as Max. The plot synopsis from IMDB: It is a simple tale of pen-friendship between two very different people; Mary Dinkle, a chubby lonely eight year old girl living in the suburbs of Melbourne, and Max Horovitz, a 44 year old, severely obese, Jewish man with Aspergers Syndrome living in the chaos of New York. Spanning 20 years and 2 continents, Mary and Max's friendship survives much more than the average diet of life's ups and downs. Like Harvie Krumpet, Mary and Max is innocent but not naïve, as it takes us on a journey that explores friendship, autism, taxidermy, psychiatry, alcoholism, where babies come from, obesity, kleptomania, sexual difference, trust, copulating dogs, religious difference, agoraphobia and much much more."

With this description Mary and Max feels like it could be similar to the upcoming Pixar film Up regarding its relationship between the young and old characters, but sans the Disney whimsy. I'm automatically interested in anything Philip Seymour Hoffman does, and this looks quirky enough to be something different for the animation genre. Trailer is embedded below courtesy of Collider

While many of us don't have the cash to spend so much time watching movies in Park City, Utah (and apparently more than usual couldn't or wouldn't cough up the dough), the internet allows us to get the inside scoop on all things related to the Sundance Film Festival. Personally I've been following Cinematical, Spout and /Film for daily reviews, news and deals happening at the fest (as well as jealously following these respective blogs' writer's Twitter updates).

One little gem of news gives us a little taste of the fest and gets us about as close to a screening of said independent films as we'll get, at least until later this year.

Embedded below we have the trailer for 500 Days of Summer, a film gaining a lot of buzz at Sundance, and much praise for performances by both Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel.

Fox Searchlight summarizes their film, "Boy meets girl. Boy falls in love. Girl doesn't. This post modern love story is never what we expect it to be -- it's thorny yet exhilarating, funny and sad, a twisted journey of highs and lows that doesn't quite go where we think it will. When Tom, a hapless greeting card copywriter and hopeless romantic, is blindsided after his girlfriend Summer dumps him, he shifts back and forth through various periods of their 500 days "together" to try to figure out where things went wrong. His reflections ultimately lead him to finally rediscover his true passions in life."

As I understand it there are also some musical numbers involving random breaks into song and animated animals. The trailer itself isn't perfect and is reminiscent of the very old trailers for the original Star Wars with it's repetitive monotone voiceover ("Star Wars. The story of a boy, a girl and a universe"). But there's just something there in the footage that gets me excited. This seems like the next Garden State and has the potential to be this year's little-movie-that-could a la Little Miss Sunshine. Check out the trailer below and let us know what you think.