MirrorMask Blu-ray Review

MirrorMask Blu-ray Full Review and Conclusion

MirrorMask is a breakthrough in sheer imagination. The Jim Henson Company has produced a worthy successor to its lineage that includes classics like Labyrinth and Dark Crystal. Although it bears the influence of the late Jim Henson, its tone is darker and decidedly less cheery than standard Henson fare which might put some viewers off. But MirrorMask is a surreal, dark fantasy tale with distinct style and a sense of humor.

What makes this film truly special is the reuniting of writer Neil Gaiman who wrote the screenplay and artist Dave McKean who directed and designed the film. The duo is a notable piece of a generation of comic book artists and writers that have revolutionized the form. The likes of Neil Gaiman, Frank Miller (300, Sin City) and Alan Moore (Watchmen) burst on the comic scene in the 80s and 90s and put the conventional spandex-clad superhero soap-opera on its ear by using the medium to tell one-shot, adult oriented stories. Gaiman and McKean have collaborated on some of the greatest graphic novels ever put to print.

Movie

We were all 15 years old once. As young adults we have imaginations that can get the better of us. We may even remember running a little too hot and cold at times, when we were good – we were very good but there was also a dark side with which our budding maturity learned to cope.

This duality is explored in a young girl named Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) a restless girl whose family owns a circus. Helena longs for a normal life and lashes out at her mom who so works hard to raise her daughter while helping to run the circus, the lifelong dream of Helena’s father. Helena’s mother falls ill and soon she is overcome with for having lashed out at her mother, then Helena is absorbed into a surreal dream where the bulk of the film takes place.

Freud believed dreams were gateways to the unconscious. Jung believed in the duality of man and that we all have a dark and a light side. The dream-world Helena occupies explores these themes through the unbridled imagination of Dave McKean’s visuals. Every frame is like turning the pages of a fine, glossy graphic novel.

I’ll avoid plot points or revealing the story itself, but it’s very familiar territory for fans of fantasy-fiction. It’s comparable to Alice in Wonderland but darker with more of a gothic or surreal twist that owes a lot to the cinematic imagery of Tim Burton, Terry Gilliam and of course Gaiman and McKean’s Sandman comics.

Despite a slow pace at times, I found the film isn’t too long which would have really hurt it. Although the film’s fantasy-realm is gorgeous to behold it can be fatiguing to some viewers. It’s similar to Frank Miller’s 300 and its limited rust-color palette. Fortunately at just over an hour and a half the film really doesn’t dabble too long in the surreal.

Like most good fantasy it’s really a tale about assessable things like growing up, finding maturity to deal with our inherent dual nature as much as it’s about magic and strange creatures. If you’re a fan of fantasy or just interested in seeing a comic art come to life in motion picture, I think you’ll find a lot to enjoy in MirrorMask.

Audio

English: Dolby TrueHD 5.1
French: Dolby Digital 5.1
Portuguese: Dolby Digital 5.1
Spanish: Dolby Digital 5.1
Thai: Dolby Digital 5.1

The Dolby TrueHD soundtrack will be a unique exercise for your surround sound system. Most movies only have to provide rockets, gunplay and lots of bassy explosions to impress. This film leaves all those stereotypes in the rear-view mirror.

Here you’ll get the sounds of a MonkeyBird’s snout falling off when it’s slapped in the back of the head, it sounds vaguely like a Lincoln Log falling on tile. The delicate but ominous sound of one eyed spiders scurrying from its hiding place behind your surrounds will make your neck itch. Curious voices and background music that escalates into the film’s score is all dynamically layered upon surreal streets where a girl’s drawings mix with schools of fish that swim through the air.

It’s rare to experience a movie that seems to revel in placing sonic objects across such a wide swath of your speaker’s soundstage. For those of you who don’t feel like you’ve really heard a movie until your sub has adequately shuffled your lunch back up your esophagus, you won’t be disappointed. There are plenty of low frequency effects especially in the presence of the expanding dark energy that threatens to absorb the light side of Helena’s dream-world.

Video

Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Subtitles: English SDH English, French, Portuguese, Spanish, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, Korean, Indonesian / Bahasa, Thai, Dutch

Most CGI movies lend themselves to 1080P high definition quite nicely. MirrorMask’s HD transfer is no exception. The video quality during the non-animated scenes (that occur especially at the beginning and end) are very crisp and clean benefiting from Sony’s HD transfer. But it’s the hallucinogenic CGI that really makes this film a feast for the eyes.

For years CGI has been opening new possibilities for motion pictures. CGI is arguably as important an advancement to film as the advent of color or talkies. The current comics-to-film trend wouldn’t be possible without it. Because computer-aided effects are getting less expensive the types of comics made for film is diversifying. As a graphic novel, MirrorMask would have fit comfortably into DC Comics esoteric adult line, Vertigo which is where Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean have worked so well together.

The relatively small budget of this film ($4 million) does translate into limitations in the special effects. Visually, the hallucinogenic scenes (largely a green-screen CGI world) lack the deep color palette you might have seen in bigger budget Disney-style animated features. It also uses a lot of fog, blurry filters and drawings as backgrounds. Anyone who plays computer games knows fog is a way developer’s can hide depth-of-field.

In lesser hands these minor graphic restrictions might have produced a less visually stunning film. In the case of MirrorMask Dave McKean uses it as a strength in the same way creators of Tron (1982) used the graphical restrictions of its day to produce one of the most visually striking movies ever made. Visually this film benefits from the old Zen philosophy less-is-more.

Special Features

All special features are presented in standard definition. These are the same features that appeared on the DVD, it might have been nice to see something about the creation of the Blu-ray disc specifically.

Director/Writer Commentary:

• Neil Talks – Interview with Neil Gaiman: Neil Gaiman talks to a camera about working with Dave McKean on past projects and about the film.
• Dave Talks About Film – An Interview With Director Dave McKean: The same as Neil Talks but this time Dave McKean himself gets a crack at the camera.
• Beginning – The Genesis Of MirrorMask: Documentary that examines the creation of the story and how the Hensons became involved in creating this film. It’s one of the more interesting documentaries on the disc. And I don’t give that out lightly, most of these on-disc documentaries are filled with yawn-inducing, self-congratulatory fluff that is no good to anyone.
• Cast and Crew Interviews: Get a look at what the cast and crew of the film have to say about working with each other.
• Day 16 – Time lapse video of one entire day of production: Titles says it all nicely.
• Flight Of The Monkeybirds and Giants Development: A look at the design and creation of two of the most visually imaginative scenes in the film.
• Questions and Answers: Footage of a QA session given by Gaiman and McKean back at Comic Con in San Diego back in 2004. A true Vertigo Comic fanboy’s delight.
• Poster and Cover Art Gallery.
• BD Live: Sadly this feature is inaccessible to me at present as my Blu-ray disc player is not a complete product and was released before the format was ready.

Overall

While MirrorMask probably isn’t destined to be the home-video classic that Henson films Labyrinth and Dark Crystal have become, MirrorMask doesn’t miss the mark by much. The film would have benefited from a slightly tighter story but it’s not an overly-long slog-fest. At just over an hour and a half it’ll keep those who are only mildly interested into the film long enough to see the end-credits roll.

That said, it’s a must-see for fans of Gaiman, McKean and Vertigo comics. It’ll prove well worthwhile to those interested in beautiful full-motion, high-definition artwork on your HDTV accompanied by fantastic high-resolution sound.

The Score Card

The scoring below is based on each piece of equipment doing the duty it is designed for. The numbers are weighed heavily with respect to the individual cost of each unit, thus giving a rating roughly equal to:

Performance × Price Factor/Value = Rating

Audioholics.com note: The ratings indicated below are based on subjective listening and objective testing of the product in question. The rating scale is based on performance/value ratio. If you notice better performing products in future reviews that have lower numbers in certain areas, be aware that the value factor is most likely the culprit. Other Audioholics reviewers may rate products solely based on performance, and each reviewer has his/her own system for ratings.

Audioholics Rating Scale

• — Excellent
• — Very Good
• — Good
• — Fair
• — Poor

Metric	Rating
Performance
Value