There are a lot of really interesting things going on in Mirrormask. It has the elements we've come to expect from these artists, Gaiman's easy-going modern faerytale, complete with a cheaky bit of bibliophilia, and McKean's dark, disturbing, but vibrant art, always a little out of focus but with an incredible kind three-dimensionality.
In fact, that visual depth is one of the most remarkable things about the film. McKean has taken, as a base, a two-dimensional art style for the protagonist, Helena, but he has rendered (or has had rendered, to be fair) that style into 3D graphics. The result is an object that looks flat, even as the camera rotates around it.
I could now launch into a description of how the appearance of superficiality hides the reality of depth and complexity, but I suspect that the sequence I'm describing was designed to remind a viewer of pencil drawings on paper, which it does quite successfully. I'm a little learry of reading it as heavily ideological. I'll have to give that more thought.
The visuals of the movie feel like a comic book, with set shots and angles that look planned, sculpted. Every shot is like a lavishly illustrated panel, a delicate mis-en-scene. Every object and person is where it should be, and nowhere else. It's not a surprise that McKean is primarily a static visual artist and that this is his first time as a filmmaker.
I sense an interesting negotation going on with the credits of the film, by the way, something akin to Wordsworth and Coleridge good-naturedly arguing about whose name goes on which poem in The Lyrical Ballads. The actual credits at the opening of the film read "Story by Neil Gaimain and Dave McKean... Written by Neil Gaiman... Directed and Designed by Dave McKean," but they might as well say "Wordy bits by Neil, and Picturey bits by Dave." The sense of collaboration is palpable.
That's not to say it's seemless. Far from it, actually. The collaboration is one born out of years of working together on comic books, which means that the two, text and pictures, work like a duet, each distinctly itself, but in combination, creating something more than the sum of their parts (horribly hackneyed phrase, I know). You can feel Neil's propensity for what I can only call conceptual punning when unwanted books silently float back to the library of their own accord. You can feel Dave's desire to make his viewer slightly uncomfortable in scenes in which the contrast is tuned far too dark, and the screen just won't go into focus.
The whole movie looks just like McKean's covers for Sandman, in fact, and the whole plot takes place in a dream. Mirrormask could easily be a one-shot or mini-arc within Sandman. We'd merely need Dream to show up briefly and say some cryptic words about how Helena's quest is real and unreal, both and neither.
One of the really fascinating moments, very subtly slipped into the film without much fuss, is when Helena quickly realises she's dreaming, and plays the situation accordingly. Gaiman likes to tell stories all about storytelling, about symbol and metaphor and narrative, and this movie is no different. Because she knows it's a dream, she can take control, and does, she can take risks, and does, she can start to not just watch the story unfold, but actively shape it herself. She is neither passive viewer, nor all-powerful storyteller, but something in between instead. Given that she is, indeed, dreaming, it seems only logical to say that is both audience and artist, that she is negotiating the story with no one other than herself.
But then, there is a problem. The film hints that Helena and her mother are both dreaming the same dream, that they both think the other is a figment in their seperate dreams, and the events that unfold would seem to match that. Helena dreams of being an idealised version of herself, capable, strong, her own hero, but she also dreams of her rebelious self, smoking cigarettes and snogging a greasy punk. Her mother dreams of herself as a dark queen who wants nothing more than to control her daughter's every move, but she's also a sleeping white queen who is,m by definition, utterly passive, in possession of no agency whatsoever.
What we have then is another "Game of You." A full-colour, full-motion, exploration of two minds, Helena's and her mother's. There's far less of a sense that the dream is 'real,' but after a few years of reading Sandman, we should realise that it's a real dream. No objective test of reality is necessary.
Posted by orion at January 11, 2006 12:39 AM