Mirrormask

This is quite possibly my favorite fantasy movie. Created in collaboration of Neil Gaiman and the Jim Henson company, the result is a glorious mix of the abstract dream world and the troubles of a teenage girl. Not a terribly good writer, Gaiman does tend to write imaginative stories that use both light and dark ideas, always walking a line between Gothic and fantasy.

Mirrormask follows a young girl named Helena who works in the Campbell Family Circus which is run by her mother and father. One particularly angst ridden night, Helena has an argument with her mother through the wall of her camper about life in the circus being crappy for a young girl. Helena says something that she knows she cannot take back and heads off to the Big Top. During a routine with her father, Helena’s mother collapses and is rushed to hospital.

Feeling guilty about what she said, believing her mother’s illness to have been caused by the argument, Helena wakes one night in a blackout to sounds of a violin and an empty flat. Upon examination she finds two men with masks for faces and a black shadow that destroys everything it touches. Escaping with the cocky juggler, Valentine, Helena enters a world that resembles the worlds she creates in her drawings. Once in the City of Light, Helena is mistaken for the Princess who came to their city and stole the Charm causing the White Queen to fall into a coma. With the Queen asleep and the Charm gone, the shadows have begun to devour the world.

With Valentine’s reluctant help, Helena vows to find the Charm and put everything to rights. But the City of Light has neighbor in the City of Shadows where the Princess had come from, and the Dark Queen is looking at Helena as a replacement for her missing daughter. Helena and Valentine follow clues about the city, introducing them to a multitude of unusual characters from Sphinx’s to orbiting giants. Racing against the ever growing shadows and fleeing from the Dark Queen Helena must learn to come to terms with the guilt she feels for her mother’s illness and learn not just to ask for forgiveness, but to forgive herself as well.

A remarkably beautiful movie accompanied by an equally dreamlike soundtrack, Mirrormask is Alice in Wonderland for the next generation.