Movie review: Mirromask

The beauty and appeal of fantasy is that it doesn't have to make
sense. The things you see in a fantasy world do not have to have exact
allegorical or symbolic equivalents in the "real" world. Sometimes,
fantasy worlds just run away from their creators, taking on their own
bizarre and idiosyncratic personalities. The joy of being a reader or
viewer of the genre lies in getting caught up in these flights of pure
fancy.

I suspect that this is why many people despise fantasy. "But it isn't
real! Why should I watch this, when it's all fake? It doesn't relate
to my life." Some just shrug off fantasy as silly and irrelevant.

If you see yourself in the above crowd, I can tell you now, you
probably won't like Mirrormask. Unapologetically fantastical, the
movie has the organic feel of a garden run completely wild. Its
creators, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, plotted out the beds, laid the
stones for the paths, planted and fertilized the seedlings, and then
let it all grow as it would.

Mirrormask could be classified as a children's movie, with a young
lead and themes that will appeal to kids. But it's not the sort of
mindless drivel that often masquerades as children's cinema. The
visual splendor and timelessness of the story will enthrall people of
all ages, and no one will confuse the heroine Helena with Lizzie
Maguire. Mirrormask successfully combines a child's fascination with
adventure and the unreal and an adult's fascinations with children
growing up.

The movie's plot is as basic and familiar as they come: a
fifteen-year-old girl wants to carve out her own life, separate from
her parents'. Just one twist: her parents own a circus, and she's a
performer. All Helena wants is a "normal life," she tells her mother,
right before adding that she wishes her mother were dead. But be
careful what you wish for - her mother, Joanne, collapses in the
middle of a show the very same evening. Suddenly, Joanne is sick, and
the girl is convinced it's her fault. The night of Joanne's surgery,
Helena goes to sleep and wakes up in Gaiman and McKean's surreal
version of Wonderland.

Shortly after wandering out of what isn't exactly her apartment
complex, she meets the masked Valentine (Jason Barry). The two nearly
get swallowed up by a carbon blackness thatis apparently sweeping
through the entire world. Predictably, the fantasy realm faces
extinction, and our young protagonist quickly volunteers to save it.
The Queen of Light has fallen into a coma, and Helena has to find the
Mirrormask to wake her and restore balance to this world.

Anyone who has ever so much as looked at the back of a book in the
sci-fi/fantasy section of Barnes & Noble could foresee this plot. It's
Joseph Campbell's classic hero-myth formula. Where this movie shines
is not in the originality of the basic storyline but in its execution.

Helena soon discovers that this strange universe is actually the world
of her own drawings, a multitude of which cover an entire wall of her
bedroom. For the adults watching this film, the story becomes a
parable of creativity. Helena brings this world into being with her
pen and her mind, and then enters into it to work out her issues with
herself and her mother. Through her art, she is able to externalize
her internal conflict and see it more clearly.

The young actress playing Helena, Stephanie Leonidas, has appeared in
several popular television shows in the UK. Leonidas rescues a role
that could easily have been irritating to the extreme and makes Helena
sympathetic, even at her most frustrating. She avoids the obnoxious
precociousness typical of leads in children's movies, displaying a
believable adolescent combination of childishness and maturity.

Director McKean's credits include a few TV projects and the covers for
Gaiman's Sandman comics. Personally, I wondered how his mind-bending
art would translate to the movie screen. I tend think of animation as
either entirely computer-generated or entirely hand-drawn, but
Mirrormask combines live-action and CG while also layering in elements
of Helena's static drawings. These techniques produce a wonderfully
real-looking otherworld. What you see on screen is a fantasy universe
that you can believe in.

McKean's gleeful use of the technology makes the movie work. When he
litters the background with flying books, schools of fish drifting by
in mid-air, bird-beaked gorillas, and rainbow-winged, human-faced
cats, the sheer uselessness of it all gives the world a depth all its
own. There's a sense that there are elements of the fantasy that
you're missing just out of the corner of your eye. McKean never drops
the illusion of reality - he refuses to acknowledge that this world is
fake or contrived. It may exist only in Helena's mind and in her art,
but that doesn't make it any less beautiful, or any less true.

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