Reviewed
Oct 17
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1 review
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animation, movies, illustration, art
• youtube.com
good movie by Neil Gaiman, the author of the Sandman series,
intersting blend of art, animation and the majic of Jim Henson's muppets
MirrorMask tells the story of Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), a fifteen-year-old girl working for her family circus, who wishes that she could run away from the circus and join real life. But such is not to be the case, as she finds herself on a strange journey into the Dark Lands, a fantastic landscape filled with giants, monkeybirds and dangerous sphinxes. On her quest to return home, Helena searches for the Mirrormask, an object of enormous power, which is her only hope of escaping the Dark Lands.
Ostensibly, MirrorMask is a kids' movie. Ostensibly, because any pairing of Gaiman and McKean, who have collaborated astonishingly in numerous graphic novel and book projects previously (including the award winning Sandman series), is unlikely to produce something simple to categorise. James Greenberg of the Hollywood Reporter commented that "if The Wizard of Oz were reborn in the 21st century, it might look a lot like MirrorMask". The comparison with The Wizard of Oz is interesting, as MirrorMask tells the tale of a young girl transported into a strange fantasy world, filled with possibility, danger, and mystery. "I think Alice and Dorothy are both valid comparisons," Gaiman concurrs when Three Monkeys suggest that there are parallels between the film's central character Helena, and the heroines of Alice in Wonderland and The Wizard of Oz. What's the attraction in creating a central character that's a young girl, entering into a fantasy world? "There's a really interesting thing which is very girl-based, and that is the movement from girl to young womanhood. It's a harder thing to get a handle on in males because it's a much more gradual process. The joy with something like MirrorMask is that that was one of the big things we wanted to talk about. That transformation. How do you stop being a girl and become a young woman? Can you stop being a young girl? Can you stop that transformation from happening? What does it mean?"
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