Review of MirrorMask (2005) by Elisa L — 24 Mar 2008

When you read the synopsis for MirrorMask -- a girl who enters a fantasy world and seeks a way out -- you may think you've been here before, through Alice's rabbit hole and down the Yellow Brick Road. Yes, the destination is familiar, but what makes MirrorMask so wondrous and strange is the journey -- and the bizarre visions that director Dave McKean and writer Neil Gaiman come up with along the way.

Our heroine is Helena (Stephanie Leonadis), a 15-year-old girl who's a bit tired of life in her parents' traveling circus. "I want to run away and join real life," she yells at her mother (Gina McKee), but instead retreats to her imaginative and elaborate drawings on the bedroom wall.

But when Mom suddenly takes ill, and Helena blames herself because of their argument, the girl finds herself deeper in her drawings than she ever imagined. She becomes a visitor to her self-created world, where everyone wears masks, books fly like butterflies and catlike sphinxes with human faces prowl the streets.

But this world, divided between the White City and the Land of Darkness, is in peril -- because the White Queen has lapsed into a deep sleep and the Dark Queen is frantically looking for her missing daughter, a princess who has taken over Helena's persona in the real world.

Helena must find the fabled MirrorMask to wake the White Queen and restore order to this world.

While the story is serviceable but predictable (then again, one could describe most fairy tales in those exact words if they wanted to), the visual design of MirrorMask is as dazzling as anything that you could hope to see. It is so fresh, so bold and so fantastical on the visual plane that it seems to re-invent the language of dreams and widen the possibilities of fantasy storytelling.

And it has meaning, the core story has weight and substance.

Another interesting thing about this movie is, similar to The Wizard Of Oz, the human characters in the fantasy are variations on people from the girl's reality -- and that is reflected in the casting. McKee plays both the good and bad queens. Rob Brydon is both the girl's real father and the prime minister of the City of Light. Jason Barry plays the selfish juggler Valentine who helps the girl on her quest and then figures into her real life.

A brilliant alchemy of computer graphics, Helena's adolescent angst, and the combination of fear and wonder that illuminates the best children's fiction -- elevates "MirrorMask" from simple fantasy to pure magic. An eye-popping fantasy-adventure that has all the makings of a cult classic.