Recently I was talking to someone about the fiction author, Margaret Atwood. I described reading her books as dropping into a trance, so that when you surface from them you feel vaguely disoriented and not quite sure if you enjoyed what it was you were reading or not. This is exactly how I would describe the experience of watching MirrorMask. Ultimately I decided I liked it.

It is a deeply engrossing movie with visuals that are so strange and yet not off-putting. That is usually the problem with something 'artsy' like this, that the oddness factor so completely alienates you from the viewing experience that it just becomes a long string of "oh my, that's messed up"... here I found I did care about the characters--their dilemmas and their futures--and yet the world was so beautiful and strange at the same time.

MirrorMask is a unique viewing experience that is worth checking out.

One further comment on the use of 3D animation in this film... why is it that CG visuals have been used to create everything from 'Gladiator' to 'Underworld' in live-action and yet in animation we've been doing a decade's worth of 'Toy Story's--at least in terms of visual style. MirrorMask was CG animation but it was no 'Toy Story' clone by any stretch... we NEED more films like this in the animation industry... taking a 90 degree turn off the beaten path and just going wherever imagination might take you...

Helena is not happy living her parents' dream. She wants to run away from the circus and join real life, and after a screaming match with her mother, has a nasty wake-up call when her mother goes to the hospital with (apparently) a brain tumor. Helena's misery takes her over, and she finds herself displaced into a dark, grimy, dangerous and uncertain world.

Like in Labyrinth, Helena's adventure can be explained away as a dream, all its elements derived from the contents of her room and her life. Again like Labyrinth, there's more to the dream than just a dream. UNlike Labyrinth, Helena's dream isn't filled with whimsical, amusing muppets. It looks more like the dark end of the surrealism branch of the local grunge-art museum. The sense of not-rightness never lets up...one has to completely disengage ones mind from expecting things to make sense. Even the friendly creatures have a bit of 'ick' about them, and the unfriendly ones are chilling. (Those intense, feral, cat-beasts with human faces were scary,)

As a film, though, I don't think Mirrormask succeeded. Story...yeah, there was one. It was actually clever and intriguing. But my mind was too busy watching to see what appeared next, and then coping with it, to get too involved with the plot or characters. The whole otherworld sequence has an emotionless feel to it, and the emotional portion of the film occurrs all at the beginning. Given more time and a better budget, I'm sure they could have hammered out a film that had better timing and character development.

But even so, it's probably the weirdest thing you can see without taking anything illegal, and it's certainly worth seeing.

I suspect this is one of those movies that's ahead of its time. A friend of mine brought it over to watch and, quite honestly, I've never seen anything like it. It has a mystical fantasy plot that is original in its own way, but it's the atmosphere of the thing that really brought me in. If there is such a thing as an avant garde narrative animation, this would be it.

While there is room for interpretation in the story, my impression was that a teenage girl working in a circus struggles to make sense of her life, and spends a good deal of her spare time doodling abstract drawings and ideas in her room. At one point part of her wakes up in the night and enters the world of her visions, where all her stories and characters and strange ideas exist around her, while another part of her continues to live in the real world...or at least, every now and then she is able to see consequences of possible courses she might take in the near future of her real life. Meanwhile she fights to defend the dream world she has become a part of and the ideals she has so long held dear.

If you're into those crazy 3-D shapes and humanoid structures you might find at a modern art exhibit, this film is for you. If you're all about graphics and catchy CG, you'd probably enjoy this, too. And if you like to lose yourself in dreams and fantasy every now and then, I'd recommend this to you, too. The reason I didn't give it a full four stars is simply because, while I did enjoy it, the story wasn't something that truly took my breath away.

But yeah, check it out! It's a shame this animation isn't more widely circulated and appreciated.