Mirrormask

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Sara T 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. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 07/12/24 Full Review CKB 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. Rated 3.5/5 Stars •  Rated 3.5 out of 5 stars 09/18/23 Full Review Fee fie F 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. Rated 4.5/5 Stars •  Rated 4.5 out of 5 stars 08/06/23 Full Review Nawt W 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. Rated 3/5 Stars •  Rated 3 out of 5 stars 03/13/23 Full Review Josh C I will gladly recommend this movie to anyone who asks. I fell in love with this masterpiece when I was young and the feelings have never faded. Rated 5/5 Stars •  Rated 5 out of 5 stars 01/18/23 Full Review jacob b 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). Rated 4/5 Stars •  Rated 4 out of 5 stars 03/31/23 Full Review Read all reviews

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