I could talk about Mirrormask, the recent fantasy film from Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, with requisite superlatives and florid qualifiers, but it’s simply not “great” enough to warrant that kind of hype. Instead, I just want to mention that it’s a fabulous visual feast with a pedestrian plot, which, if repaired, would have put it in the league of Alice Through the Looking Glass, its obvious progenitor.
With the assistance of Jim Henson’s puppet shop, Dave McKean, a long-time collaborator of Gaiman’s, most notably on his seminal Sandman run, designs and directs this movie as only a visual artist not traditionally steeped in cinema can: with the sort of surreal vigor that few auteur fantasists can begin to conjure.
From flying giants engaged in an aerial erotic ballet, to pure Darkness sweeping the land, to Jack-In-The-Box seducers who sing Karen Carpenter songs, to hungry sphinxes who thrive on riddles and the pages of printed books, to palaces and cities, and the amazing “Bobs,” who in only a few moments of screen time, redefine violent motion and grace — the movie is loaded with stuff to look at and say “Whoa.” I put this movie in the league of failed visual masterpieces that include Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within or Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, movies I could watch over and over again, not because of their particularly interesting plots, but because of the completeness and vividness of the worlds they create. Frankly, there’s not enough of that.