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PLOT: An imaginative 15-year-old British girl resents her life in the circus, escaping into a dreamworld that may save her, or destroy her life and kill her mother.
In an era of cinema where anything seems possible, assuming that filmmakers spend enough on the digital special effects, MirrorMask is a rarity.
It is so fresh, so bold and so fantastical on the visual plane that it seems to re-invent the language of dreams and widen the possibilities of fantasy storytelling.
Dave McKean's film does so to chronicle a 15-year-old British girl's harrowing, coming-of-age journey. Everything we see in the heightened, surreal world that is presented on screen is a product of the girl's fertile imagination and her remarkable artistic abilities.
The paradox of how new this looks is that there are dozens of references to the familiar.
In the realm of children's literature and/or movies, MirrorMask invokes fare ranging from The Wizard Of Oz to Alice In Wonderland, Labyrinth and the underappreciated 1988 drama Paperhouse (a connection made by sharp U.S. critic Roger Ebert, who recognized the dangerous trap that a dreamscape can become).
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In the realm of fine art, MirrorMask employs images that suggest the work of Michelangelo, Chagall, Max Ernst, Picasso and even contemporary filmmaker-artists such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.
This could turn into a toxic stew in the wrong hands. But graphic artist and director McKean, working with collaborator Neil Gaiman on the story and screenplay, delivers a breathtaking phantasmagoria.
And it has meaning. The core story has weight and substance, even if there are repetitive passages.
The central figure is the girl (a charismatic Stephanie Leonidas, channeling Helena Bonham Carter in her youth). She is a jack-of-many-trades in her parents' one-ring circus. While most kids want to run away to join the circus, our heroine wants to run away to join real life.
One day, her resentment slides into cruelty. She tells her mother (the lustrous and versatile Gina McKee) that she wishes her dead. Her mother falls deathly ill.
At this point, not surprisingly, the girl escapes into her fantasy world, a quixotic land of good and evil, of dark and light, of creatures so bizarre that the girl does not even recognize how she could have conjured them.
In the fantasyland, Leonidas must find an elusive, rare object, the mirrormask, both to save the Queen of the City of Light from a dire fate and to stave off the gathering forces of darkness. Meanwhile, she catches glimpses of her own destructive alter ego.
Similar to The Wizard Of Oz, the human characters in the fantasy are variations on people from the girl's reality -- and that is reflected in the casting. McKee plays both the good and bad queens. Rob Brydon is both the girl's real father and the prime minister of the City of Light. Jason Barry plays the selfish juggler Valentine who helps the girl on her quest and then figures into her real life.
The fantastical parts of MirrorMask do wear viewers out. You need patience and faith that contrivances in the plot will disappear. In addition, the real-life ending to the film seems oddly flat, but that may be because of the intensity of the journey.
Yet, no matter how the prism is turned, MirrorMask is unique and dazzling in its surreal show of light.
BOTTOM LINE: Individual dreamscapes may leave you squirming or puzzled but the overall movie has such dazzling phantasmagoria that it holds you enthralled.
(This film is rated PG)