So many movies look so much the same, I suppose it's worth seeing one even if its only redeeming value is a unique design. Such is the case with "Mirrormask." The dreamscape here is a drawn world decorated across the daughter's room. She enters this world, and sees, through windows, her doppelgänger making a mess of the real world. The CGI impressions recall graphic novels, but with a dream logic that has books fluttering and floating in the air--just like the fish, and one would assume potentially, what with their wings, the cats. The lighting and yellow color scheme goes along with the mirror and window motifs, as though sunlight were being refracted through the screen. Just about everyone within this masquerade reality, aptly enough, also wear masks. "Mirrormask" may be a worthwhile picture just to look at; perhaps, it's better if you only look at it rather than follow the story.
That story involves a circus, which is promising enough, but, then, things turn maudlin with the sick mother and the teenager(s) wavering between whimpering and dressing goth to supposedly represent being bad. The dream plot is a standard quest that gets derailed with the slightest of explanations. For instance, I don't know why she gave the key to Valentine when the mask is presumed to be behind one of the keyholes in the room he's wandering away from. The Black Queen episode, in general, seems a needless parroting of the good-and-bad witch plot established by "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), to counteract the comatose White Queen here.
Speaking of ripping off other children's stories, I came to "Mirrormask" because of its reported allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Unfortunately, what there is of that here is slight. The girl doesn't follow a white rabbit so much as wear two of them as slippers. There's the business of going through mirrors. I also wanted to think that the daughter and mother debating whose dream they were in to be recalling Alice exploring the same quandary with the Red King, but I suppose it just as well could be a coincidence. There's no sustained interplay here with the works of Carroll; the Alice books, rather, seems an easy connection for the filmmakers to briefly make because both involve dreamworlds--ditto the Oz film. Jim Henson, whose work serves a similar purpose here, did likewise with his "Labyrinth" (1986).
That story involves a circus, which is promising enough, but, then, things turn maudlin with the sick mother and the teenager(s) wavering between whimpering and dressing goth to supposedly represent being bad. The dream plot is a standard quest that gets derailed with the slightest of explanations. For instance, I don't know why she gave the key to Valentine when the mask is presumed to be behind one of the keyholes in the room he's wandering away from. The Black Queen episode, in general, seems a needless parroting of the good-and-bad witch plot established by "The Wizard of Oz" (1939), to counteract the comatose White Queen here.
Speaking of ripping off other children's stories, I came to "Mirrormask" because of its reported allusions to Lewis Carroll's Alice books. Unfortunately, what there is of that here is slight. The girl doesn't follow a white rabbit so much as wear two of them as slippers. There's the business of going through mirrors. I also wanted to think that the daughter and mother debating whose dream they were in to be recalling Alice exploring the same quandary with the Red King, but I suppose it just as well could be a coincidence. There's no sustained interplay here with the works of Carroll; the Alice books, rather, seems an easy connection for the filmmakers to briefly make because both involve dreamworlds--ditto the Oz film. Jim Henson, whose work serves a similar purpose here, did likewise with his "Labyrinth" (1986).