MirrorMask (2005)

[randy_byers]

I watched this DVD with Sharee back in February, and she hung onto it because she liked it so much. Ended up lending it to a bunch of her new friends up there. I just got it back from her when we were in Vancouver, and I watched it for a second time last night.

In the meantime I had seen Circus Contraption, which gave me a different context for the modern circus section that opens the film. I had also in the meantime seen Coraline, which is also based on a Neil Gaiman story. What is it with Gaiman and bizarre, evil mothers?

I picked up the DVD because of C. Jerry Kutner's comments about it (contrasting it to Pan's Labyrinth) in his series of Women in Wonderland posts at Bright Lights After Dark. (Coraline was another movie that he wrote about in the series.) Kutner basically dismisses the opening realistic section and focuses on the look and design of the fantasy world. It seems to be mostly animated, with live actors playing the main characters. Some of the live characters, however, are modified with masks and costumes so that they look fantastic themselves. The design work really is wonderfully weird and surrealist. Kutner compares it to Bosch and Ernst. There's a lot of play with masks of various types and with faces treated as separate elements, perhaps even as another type of mask. There may be a bit of Miyazaki, too, in the symbolic, dreamlike strangeness of the creatures in the other world.

Kutner argues that MirrorMask was less acclaimed than Pan's Labyrinth because MirrorMask is truly strange and singular, while Pan's Labyrinth is conventional and thus easier for people to absorb. I find this a dubious proposition. I'd say Pan's Labyrinth benefited from the fact that Guillermo del Toro has a relatively large fan base and from the fact that there was a much greater effort to promote it. I saw trailers for Pan's Labyrinth many times, whereas I don't remember seeing trailers for MirrorMask at all. In fact, my impression was that it came pretty close to being just dumped direct to video.

MirrorMask as actually a fairly conventional story too, as Kutner seems to acknowledge when he advocates ignoring the opening 20 minutes. It's the other world that's something rich and strange.

I'd be interested in what other people thought of this one too.

Comments

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

That's very interesting, because I actually don't generally like his scores, but that one (which he apparently modeled on Bernard Herrmann's score for Vertigo) is really cool and sounds completely different from anything else of his I've heard.