Reader Recommendation: Mirrormask (2005)

After watching Coraline last week, several people suggested that I watch MirrorMask. I knew this movie had that Alice in Wonderland quality of a girl ending up in a strange alternate world, and that it had some animated qualities to it, but most people were pretty vague about it when I asked. Even so, my curiosity was piqued and when a friend said he had it and could loan it to me, that's all I needed to convince me to see it. MirrorMask doesn't really have any recognizable actors, but sometimes that can help with the immersion in the film. More after the jump.


So MirrorMask is about a girl named Helena who lives with her parents in the circus. She's a juggler, her father is the ring leader as well as a juggler, and her mother is a rope climbing acrobat. She's sick of always being told what to do and just wants to leave the circus a live a normal life. After they have an argument, Helena's mother collapses back stage. Between the stress of her mother's illness and the circus quickly going under while her father deals with the hospital, Helena's life soon unravels. Oddly though, she finds herself waking up in a strange dying land of shadow and light that seems to mirror her own life in a bizarre way. It's up to Helena to save this world and return to her own before it's too late.

A crazy fantasy world filled with new ideas and imagination

 It would be difficult to talk about this movie without bring up the visuals, and there's a few different aspects I'd like to bring up regarding them. First of all I liked how at the start of the movie used difference filters depending on where Helena was. In the circus everything was colorful and cheery, but out in the city it's all washed out white and grey and generally drab all around. Later the mirror land has a sort of mixture of the two conditions, so areas being quite colorful while others are mostly white and alienating.

Valentine

The whole world has this really cool aesthetic of looking like paper and sketches that I really liked. I also really liked all the characters that we meet who have masks permanently as part of their faces. Especially a character named Valentine who completely stole the show for me, and is Helena's companion during her adventure in the other world. In fact there were several more abstract characters that I really liked, the librarian, the sphinxes, the orbiting giants just to name a few. It really had a Neverending Story feel to the whole film.

Unfortunately, I can't say ALL the visuals were so great. Some of the cg work seemed a little lacking. Not all of it though, the sphinxes and the librarian as well as many others were all cg, but I thought they looked great. Sometimes though they just looked out of place, like the spider eyeball that keeps running around accomplishing nothing every time it shows up. I should point out that everything was animated well, in their movement, my issues more stemmed from the quality, or complete lack of texture work on the cg models themselves. It was odd how some of them were fine but other weren't. Really uneven in my opinion. Overall it was good though.

Not all the cg seems to fit well on occation

In the end I liked it. Some of the cg work bothered me while watching it, but even now while thinking back on it, it seems even better than when I was watching it. And I only just finished watching it about 40 minutes ago. It has that mystical charm that seems so illusive to most movies, that allows it to make up for any shortcomings it may have. This was a fun and cool little movie that I think I would recommend to anyone who leans towards liking movies with a more fantastical and artistic swing.