film feature

Mirrormask

Film Tip

Neil Gaiman’s first original foray into feature length cinema should be cause for celebration indeed. With his Sandman series and books such as Coraline, Neverwhere and American Gods, he has taken fantastical story telling away from the formulaic, lazy and geeky and back into the realms of the philosophical and metaphorical, but always being entertaining and exciting. This film, telling the tale of a girl who longs to run away to join the real world, a cute inversion of the usual girl who longs to run away to join the circus, promises to be everything we have come to expect from this author, and it should be an absolute feast of imagination. Neil Gaiman has always been best accompanied by the art of Dave McKean, a distinctive artist who did the covers for all of Gaiman’s Sandman books, several graphic novels, including the demented Arkham Asylum, and hundreds of album covers. Although he has done two short movies before, this too will be his feature movie debut as director, and from the promo shots, it looks like his digital collage style has migrated beautifully and perfectly to the silver screen. Although this film will probably create an initial frenzy among among the comics reading crowd, it should not be restricted to them. People just interested in good-old fashioned story-telling will probably find equal glee in Mirrormask, and although it may look highly stylised, people who normally despise CGI (like myself) should still go check it out, as I rather suspect Dave McKean’s art will be somewhat special in this medium. [am]
Cineworld, 19 Aug, 5:30pm; Filmhouse, 27 Aug, 12:00pm, £7:95 (£5:20), filmpp 54

published: Aug-2005

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