The kind folks at Jim
Henson Productions sent me some awesome Mirrormask art as well as
some interesting reading. Enjoy!
This one's my favorite.
Notice the two small people on the bottom left...
And I love this one, too, because I
love Alice in Wonderland and this seems to me to be a great Cheshire
Cat-like image.
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Here's a brief description of
the movie (from the Jim Henson Company):
MIRRORMASK is a groundbreaking
effort from director Dave McKean with a screenplay by Neil Gaiman.
Teaming up with The Jim Henson Company, they combine live action
with digital animation in a spectacular concoction that will dazzle
audiences across the board.
MIRRORMASK tells the story of Helena (Leonidas), a fifteen-year-old
girl working for her family circus, who wishes-quite ironically-that
she could run away from the circus and join real life. But such is
not to be the case, as she finds herself on a strange journey into
the Dark Lands, a fantastic landscape filled with giants,
monkeybirds and dangerous sphinxes. On her quest to return home,
Helena searches for the Mirrormask, an object of enormous power,
which is her only hope of escaping the Dark Lands.
A dark fantasy with elements of THE DARK CRYSTAL and LABYRINTH,
MIRRORMASK is a thrilling new chapter in the celebrated careers of
Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman. Filled with imagination and
unforgettable imagery, and fully realized with the help of CGI,
MIRRORMASK is a visual and psychological menagerie of dreamscapes,
nightmares and otherworldly creatures.
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Here's what Dave McKean had to
say about his experience:
“I don’t know where to start, every
day was a steep learning experience…
I would say I have learned most about my own strengths and
weaknesses. I have a tendency to fall in love with the purity of a
formal solution to a problem, and then I just become blind to its
possible flaws, and any little changes made feel like they are
watering down the idea. I think this caused several difficulties on
the film, and I think I'll be conscious of that tunnel vision from
now on.
Editing is always a wondrous experience, an alchemical experience.
But on this film, working with an editor really for the first time,
and noticing his approach, continually 'on the story', was a big
lesson. Any block of dialogue in the script longer than three lines
looked suspiciously like fat needing to be trimmed. We cut our
penultimate edit, which didn't have any scenes or large chunks to
shed, down by ten minutes just by trimming frames, and the odd shot.
I have no idea where all that fat came from, but it really helped.
I have also learned that you don't start up a new computer-rendering
studio during production. The little blighters need at least three
months to get to know each other before an animator goes anywhere
near them. And finally, I learned that computers are as human as the
rest of us. Our technical director named all the machines after
different bands. The four Macs in the edit suite were named after
the Beatles; fair enough, I was John. But then we needed a fifth so
he named it Yoko, and they all stopped talking to each other.”
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For even more information about the
movie and the people behind it, here's the entire
press kit.
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