I’d Love To Turn You On At The Movies #181 - Mirrormask – (2005, dir. Dave McKean)

When I was in a freshman in high school in the early nineties, I wanted to hang out in T-Court, an outdoor space carved out between the junction of three academic buildings where all of the weird, creative older students ate lunch. These students traded cassette tapes by Bauhaus and Sonic Youth, talked about movies like The Fisher King and Edward Scissorhands, and read comics like Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman. From that point forward, I felt a deep connection between Neil Gaiman’s work and what it means to be young, strange, and drawn to the less explored corners of life. Dave McKean’s off-kilter, evocative cover illustrations for The Sandman series provided an influential touchstone for the decade’s non-mainstream style. In 2005, Gaiman and McKean teamed up with The Jim Henson Company to create Mirrormask, a coming-of-age movie that bristles with all of the emotional intensity and unbridled imagination of an adolescent fever dream.

While an inventive credits sequence establishes the visual language of the film, Gaiman and McKean drop the audience into an unfolding domestic drama within minutes of the opening curtain for The Campbell Family Circus. The performers are busy warming up, but Helena, the daughter of the couple who own and run the circus, sits in her trailer amusing herself with an improvised sock puppet show. As the circus begins, Helena’s mother rushes to her daughter’s locked trailer and pleads, “All of those kids in there, they want to run away and join the circus.” In real life!” Helena’s fight with her mother escalates and she yells out something hurtful that she might regret instantly, but certainly feels a deep, growing sense of remorse when he mother falls ill during that night’s performance. By the next morning, Helena and her father are facing the mounting challenges of medical bills, the fate of the circus, and the uncertainty of her mother’s health problems. One night during this stressful, traumatic week, Helena falls asleep and wakes up in world that quickly reveals itself to be a skewed reflection of the life she knows. Mirrormask proceeds with an idiosyncratic fluidity that blurs the distinction between the images in an artist’s sketchbook and dreams that inspired them. Before this movie, Gaiman and McKean had been working together for years on collaborative projects that honed their complementary artistic styles. Adding The Jim Henson Company to bring this shared vision to life on screen feels like an inevitable choice. Stephanie Leonidas, although no longer in her teens during production, brings a surprisingly authentic innocence, churlishness, and honesty to her performance of Helena, a teenager facing a crisis while balancing just on the edge of impending adulthood. Gina McKee and Rob Brydon, two great, veteran supporting actors from British film and television play Helena’s parents and provide the film’s generous heart as well as its wicked sense of danger.

Mirrormask shares more than a few similarities with Jim Henson’s 1986 coming-of-age fantasy romp, Labyrinth, but something about this movie feels like a secret and it possesses a delicate intimacy absent from the earlier movie. Gaiman offsets his masterful fantasy world-building skills with a wry, literate sense of humor while McKean and The Jim Henson Company push the bounds of CGI to create moments that feel like walking through a living abstract sculpture exhibit. When I first saw this movie, I realized that Helena reminded me of the kids who hung out in T-Court. Helena feels like a real teenager coping with massive changes in her life and struggling to make sense of what’s happening. In portraying Helena’s journey so beautifully, Gaiman and McKean achieve an unflinching emotional impact unusual for a movie aimed at young people.

-          John Parsell