Mirrormask

However beautiful the cinematography is, the movie itself drags on. It’s messy.

Wildly inventive, bizarre & just a wonder to watch unfold.

Love this slightly tilted coming-of-age story with creepy visuals and alluring music. As an elder millennial, for me this movie touches on the feeling of watching Wizard of Oz as a child mixed with Pan’s Labyrinth. A solid favorite of mine.

Mirrormask is worth watching as a celebration of visual creativity in film for its own sake. On a budget of only $4 million, the filmmakers came up with an amazing array of effects on the cheap that beautifully blend live actors with CGI magic. But the storyline is cold and strange, leaving you feeling oddly cheated by the end. Designer/director Dave McKean and writer Neil Gaiman, working with The Henson Company, first considered making a prequel to Dark Crystal or a sequel for Labyrinth, but decided to do something new that was somehow "Jim Hensonish". They cooked up a coming-of-age fantasy about a girl named Helena working out her mother-daughter conflict, which went very much outside the experience of these two men, and it shows. Helena is a compulsive drawer, and her long dream sequence fittingly takes place inside the graphic world she has created. Unfortunately, the filmmakers used artwork by McKean, whose dark, gritty style works far better for Batman graphic novels than for representing the fantasies of an adolescent girl. Thus the extended dream sequence is threatening and creepy in a too-masculine manner. Whereas the girl in Labyrinth clearly wins over a batch of potentially threatening beings with her nice yin approach, the critters helping Helena always seem capable of turning on her the next moment. And there are ever-present cat-thingies with disgusting men's faces -- what girl would ever imagine cats this way? The relationships between people are distant and disconnected, and the mother-daughter exchanges would fit a Dickens novel better than a 21st-century screenplay (at one point the hospitalized mom actually recites the "girl with a curl" nursery rhyme to her distraught daughter). The ending seems very un-right: after Helena's nightmare, she learns her mother is cured and her dreamer dad says everything will be all right, at which a narrator proclaims "And it was!" But this 'all right' means Helena stays with her goofy parents' dumb little circus, and a cute young guy straight out of her dream shows up to join it; in other words, sheer fairy tale stuff. Looks like this girl is never going to grow up -- so much for becoming an independent adult.

Absolutely beautiful movie. Most reviews I have seen from this movie are critisizing its bad cgi, but I think that's unfair. Would you enjoy it more if the sphynx had raytracing? Or if the floating giants were full of subsurface scattering? Nah, I don't think so. CG doesn't have to be good to be entertaining or beatiful, it just has to fit, and I think the CG in mirrormask does that exact thing perfectly. For example, the CG in Tron was never meant to be realistic, yet it's still captivating. Why? Because it fits. While the plot drags every once in awhile, I feel that the beautiful visuals makeup for it.

For being the supposed spiritual descendant of Labyrinth, this movie strangely tries to overcomplicate a coming-of-age story by wrapping it around absolutely frivolous psychological concepts that barely complement the movie's oddball storytelling style. Which is such a weird choice. Why not keep the story simple but visually stylized? Why does this story need egos, shadows, and a bucket of half-assed projections that never amount to anything because every five minutes the plot moves onto another subplot and an outlandish location they made up on a computer? The actors do a good job, though, and the soundtrack is intrusive and memorable and fits the visuals admirably. But nothing in this movie will stick with me because its art style makes the whole thing seem like a blurry slush in the end.

With creative visuals that really capture the experience of being in a dreamlike world, committed performances from leads who do a good job acting alongside creatures that aren't actually there and even a few funny moments, MirrorMask's story might not be for everyone (it isn't convoluted but the surreal vibes mean that it's not a 100% straightforward narrative either) but this Dave McKean/Neil Gaiman collaboration is an underrated, and refreshingly different, fantasy adventure from an era where theg were in their prime (it did come out in the midst of Harry Potter's reign after all).

Classic masterpiece.... a work of art

With what they did for the budget, this movie is that one you remember in the back of your mind and wonder why the hell haven't I been watching this more? Grimm, dark and futuristic aesthetic of the early and mdi 2000's is so nostalgic However the weakness of this movie is unlike the comic you have all the time in the world to seriously study McKean's artist's work and analyze the panels, however in a film the director controls pacing and the details that they want you to see is mostly lost on visuals... The cast really needs credit here as they're performances carried this 4 million dollar movie with some unstable practical effects If you wish to see a fantasy film without a pointlessly evil villain or a stupidly heroic or selfless give Mirror Mask a watch!

Visually impressive but too weird with an underlying story that fails to deliver. You don't really care for the characters. Watch Coraline which is far more polished and has similar themes