Flutterby™! : mirrormask

Finally saw Mirrormask on Saturday. Sort of Pink Floyd The Wall meets Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, and I mean that as the highest compliment.

We start with Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean. Gaiman's work you might know from American Gods or The Sandman, stories that at first appear simple, perhaps even simplistic, but have layers of depths. One friend described his work with "you don't have to have an advanced degree in classical mythology to understand it, but it helps". McKean is an illustrator who does a lot of collage like work, a style instantly recognizeable if you know it, and you've probably seen it. Add in a healthy dose of Jim Henson Studios style animation, with mixed live action.

The plot summaries you've seen do it justice, girl in a circus family hates that world and wants to join the normals, and in the process finds herself in a bizarre surreal world which she underswtands is a dream, but, like dreams, she finds out of her control. The process of her tracking down the mirrormask and escaping plays on themes of adolescence and childhood rebellion in in ways that never quite become as threatening or menacing as a world in which the first few people she meeet are destroyed by advancing waves of... something dark and creepy... would seem to go.

So it could become a horror movie, but it doesn't. It dances delicately along the line of children's movie and dark psychological thriller in a way that few films can.

I don't know if it's a great movie, but it's certainly a good one, and I'd go see it again in the theater. That big screen does a lot to make the surreal world that much more real.