Hieronymus Bosch for Kids

I saw MirrorMask this evening. Ay carumba! I've been pretty hostile towards CGI in the past. Mainstream filmmakers have been awfully self-congratulatory with their own efforts, but to me it just looked like someone drew on the film. Which I suppose is essentially what it is. The audience was clearly supposed to be awed by what to me looked barely a step up from Harryhausen-esque stopmotion. But after Sin City & now MirrorMask, I think the technology has finally caught up with the artisan. The medium has come a long way since the Lucas/Spielberg cartooniness that I once smirked at. And it figures the first of the master craftsmen would be summoned from the realm of the graphic novel.

I wasn't too familiar with Dave McKean's work going into this. I've read Gaiman's Good Omens & some of the Sandman series. So I wasn't exactly sure what to expect. MirrorMask is like Labyrinth as seen through the eyes of Jan Svankmajer. Visually, what Brazil was to the eighties & City of Lost Children to the nineties, MirrorMask must be to the aughts. To say it's dreamlike is an understatement. It looks as if it was filmed on breathing parchment. We've heard this sort of storyline before - not much different from the classic Wizard of Oz, Alice in Wonderland "girl on quest through strange land" fare - but the brilliance lies in the presentation. As if we've been propelled from sock puppet theatre to a Cecil B DeMille production. Also, I can't get its eerie reinterpretation of Bacharach's "Close To You" out of my head for the life of me.

This film is a reassuring sign for the direction of cinema. I'm genuinely excited to see what else lies around the corner.