MirrorMask
The Jim Henson Company brings us MirrorMask, a 2005 fantasy film that follows the journey of a girl into a dreamlike adventure. Helena, portrayed by Stephanie Leonidas, is the story’s protagonist. The young circus performer and aspiring artist dreams of running away to join ‘real life’. After a fight with her mother, in which Helena wishes she could ‘be the death’ of her, her mother falls ill, possibly from a brain tumor. Helena blames herself for the illness. On the night doctors operate on her mother, Helena dreams, or thinks she dreams, of a mysterious world of masked people and monsters. In the context of the dream world, it is not a dream that has taken her there, but the Princess, daughter of the Dark Queen, who has used a charm (the MirrorMask) to escape the dream world.
Helena volunteers to help find the MirrorMask and use it to restore balance in the dream world. It soon becomes apparent that Helena is the creator of the dream world, having created it from her drawings, posters, sculptures and daydreams. Her mother’s illness is mirrored by an enchanted slumber which has befallen the White Queen. The two queens are identical to each other and to Helena’s mother Joanne.
The film, directed by Dave McKean, is a convoluted and chaotic mess of “design” and “art.” MirrorMask was the Jim Henson Company’s attempt at grabbing on to some of the long term home video success of other films like The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, yet MirrorMask is a significantly lesser film than those and really has no continuity or resonating factors that make a whole lot of sense. The story seems simple enough, but upon viewing the film it becomes a mystery as to how the story is coming together and, more important, where the story is amongst the jumble of cheap-looking creatures. Instead of reacting with wonder at the “world” as created through Helena’s imagination, I found myself getting increasingly annoyed at the acid-flashback tone to the film.
The film IS visually imaginative in the context that throwing a man’s face and some coloured wings on a cat is imaginative and in the context that developing faces that look like deformed cookies is imaginative. This style of imagination appears to be cobbled together from a mish-mash of visions and failed lab experiments, none of which add any substance or coherency to the film. Instead, it becomes a crowded, dull and annoying mess of colours and flimsy effects. The whole film looks like it was created using a slightly livelier version of PaintShop.
The film is such a combination of strange and bizarre “artistic” sensibilities, that one begins to think that any coherency that formulates an imaginative piece occurs relatively by accident. It’s not creative invention that forms MirrorMask; it’s the notion of throwing absurd ideas against a wall to see what sticks. It’s hard to call this a family film, too, because I can’t see much to grab on to here. There are no resonating or memorable characters for children and the message is so muddled behind the fluff and masturbatory characters that it’s really easy to forget there ever was a plot.
The problem with creating such a chaotic world is that there is virtually nothing to grab on to for substance or continuity. The great fantasy films have elemental properties that create a common ground, but MirrorMask abandons all of that in favor of strange creatures and odd paint-by-number locales that really don’t resonate in the long term. We’re left with a silly and accidentally creative cast of characters without personalities and the end result is utter boredom. MirrorMask fails on every level, in my opinion, and is as hollow a fantasy film as I have ever seen.
Trailer:
