MirrorMask is "odd" film, not a good one. I'm not a fan of good films or music, "good" meaning, as I understand the word from what other people use it to describe, "shiny, seamless, perfect and bland" and s*** meaning "fun, exciting, roughly-textured and interesting." I much prefer the odd and interesting ones, which this is at least in is visuals. It's great tribute to
The Dark Crystal and
Labyrinth in that though the medium and accents are different it revives the '80s tradition of the feature film as a phantasmagoria of set-pieces for which the story is merely a perfunctory linking device, typically with a trite and stereotypical moral which is made a laughing stock of by the myriad of realisations one can take from their visual systems. A better comparison would be that its the kind of film one could image Kneehigh making if they made a feature film but of course they're less known internationally.
I'll try not to rant on all night, which such grab-bag of thoughts is wont to let me, but I should at least be more explicit about the medium. As with many of Dave McKean's still illustrations, the visuals are a computer-aided collage, of human, animal and machine, of photographic and graphic and now also of live action and animation. But because they are now required to move and because the budget it so low for an SFX-heavy fantasy feature, the fusion is
much less convincing and more obvious and theatrical than those still collages (which I'm not particularly fond of and find a bit too shiny) and all the more interesting to me for that. For example, rather than trying to convincingly fuse a filmed mouth to a CG head, or to animate a CG human mouth (which they didn't have the time nor budget for and which wouldn't have been at home in McKean's visual world to begin with), the obviously two-dimensional and disparate mouth footage will be applied as a moving texture to a flat object stuck onto the 3D head, which is then itself flattened to 2D for theatrical presentation. It reminds me of Sergei Paradjanov's creation of imaginary locations in what exists of his
Confession by cutting together footage shot in obviously different real locations (the practice is not an uncommon one but his self-exposé of it though obviousness is) and Kathy Rose's projections of projections in
Life in the Web – or the other way round, which considering when I saw
MirrorMask is the more likely. If you think that you hate CGI, you'll probably enjoy
MirrorMask, as it made me realise that it is not the medium that I dislike but the way in which it tends to be used.
Couple of other things: I was pleasantly surprised to find that the story and the light-and-dark theme are not
as annoyingly stereotypical as I had feared, though the dialogue I largely find to be something of a "greatest misses" of Gaiman stock jokes. And whether I'd recommend it or not depends significantly on the size you'd be viewing it at, as it's a film which makes use of the theatrical scale and looses more of its power than many without it: there's one still in particular which I couldn't understand why it had been chosen to promote to promote the film as it was so extremely bland compared to what else I had seen from it but on the cinema screen and in it's context in the film it was perhaps the most affecting shot of all.
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MirrorMask worth blind buy?
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