Image courtesy of www.impawards.com
Director :
Dave McKean
Cast :
Stephanie Leonidas……….Helena
Gina McKee……….Joanne
Rob Brydon……….Helena’s Father/Prime Minister
Jason Barry……….Valentine
Dora Bryan……….Nan
Robert Llewellyn……….Gryphon
Andy Hamilton……….Small Hairy
The problem with working against a blue screen is that sometimes the fantastic imagery conjured can overwhelm the story. With a new technology like blue screen becoming en vogue, so far the results are mixed. 2005 had Sin City, one of the best films of the year, which used the blue screen to tell a great story with a cast that didn’t chafe under the constraints of an artificial set. 2004 yielded Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, which used the technology to create fantastic imagery with a cast that didn’t know how to effectively use the setting and scenery. Into the blue-screen generated films comes Mirrormask, a movie that looks great but doesn’t have much meat to it.
Mirrormask follows the tale of Helena, whose parents are owner/operators of a circus (Gina McKee and Rob Brydon). They want her to follow in their footsteps, much to her chagrin. She would rather be an artist, as she has quite the knack for drawing. When her mother falls ill with an undisclosed illness, Helena wakes up in the world she created through her art. Stuck in a world which is slowly disappearing, she has to find out the cause and somehow manage to get back into her own world.
And it’s a wonderful little story to tell, as there is an underlying story about accepting what is needed and what is required out of life. But the problem is that the focus of the film, much like Sky Captain, is on the fantastic imagery.
And it does look incredible. Given a blue screen and a story that requires a lot of fantastic settings and jaw-dropping visuals, Dave McKean has obviously spent a lot of time working with the animation crew to bring the story to life. There are plenty of jaw-dropping visuals to go around, as Mirrormask is an ocular overload of wondrous sights and scenes. But the problem is that the visuals become too much in the face of the story itself.
It’s a story with good intentions, for sure, as it touches on a lot of themes that are easily relatable. It’s just that the sort of attention to detail paid to the visuals aren’t paid to the story-telling. There seems to be a bit of a fascination by McKean with the blue screen, as he spends a lot of time developing what his visuals are looking like as opposed to focusing on the story of Helena and her buddy Valentine (Jason Barry) as they try and figure a way to restore the balance to the drawn world that mimics the lack of balance and discord of her life in the real world.
