Dave McKean’s MirrorMask (above) and Guillermo del Toro’s Pan’s Labyrinth were released within a year of each other. Both are women-in-wonderland tales. Pan’s Labyrinth is about a little girl who flees from her evil Spanish-fascist stepfather into a woodsy fairyland. MirrorMask is about a ‘tween with a dying mom who enters a dream world in order to save her.
Pan’s Labyrinth has some exceptional fantasy sequences, but is also in many ways clichéd and trite. The evil stepfather is a one-dimensional moustache-twirling stock villain. The actress playing the little girl is not very expressive. Worst of all is the fairytale kingdom at the film’s end where the little girl becomes a princess. It looks like a Burger King commercial!
MirrorMask starts slowly - you can more or less skip the first 20 minutes taking place in the "real" world - but once the girl, Helena, crosses over into McKean’s computer-animated dream world, the film becomes something genuinely rich and strange. The screenplay is by Neil Gaiman (author of the book on which Coraline is based). Gaiman’s frequent collaborator, Dave McKean not only co-wrote the story and directed it, but is responsible for the film’s production design. The originality of McKean’s imagery - part Hieronymous Bosch/part modern Surrealism - is what makes the film something to see.
Pan’s Labyrinth opened to nearly universal acclaim. Stephen King called it "the best fantasy film since The Wizard of Oz." It won Academy Awards for Best Cinematography, Best Art Direction, and Best Makeup. (The cinematography and creature makeup was indeed quite good.)
But the more original MirrorMask was virtually ignored. How come?
Harold Bloom in The Western Canon points to "singularity" and "strangeness" as marks of truly great art. Artists like Shakespeare, Cervantes, Milton, and Dante represent a distinct and disorienting break from the writers that preceded them. They teach us how to read them. Just as genuinely original film artists like Antonioni, Brakhage, Tarkovsky, Godard, or Lynch - all disorienting on a first viewing - teach us how to watch their films. Singularity and strangeness may prevail in the long term, but in the short term they can be an audience turn-off.
MirrorMask was a little too strange to be immediately popular. Its imagery is closer to Max Ernst than to Walt Disney. Instead of the usual John-Williamsesque music that accompanies most fantasy films these days, it has an abstract jazz score. Even the film’s "reality" sequences are expressionistically stylized, taking place in a sort of faux-Fellini circus world. Audiences need something familiar to hold onto before they take off into a dream world, and MirrorMask fails to provide them with that. In the following clip, Helena has been captured by the Queen of Shadows (above left), a dark mirror version of her real-world mother. (As noted in our Psycho post, alternate realities are often inhabited by distorted mirror versions of the loved ones the protagonists leave behind.) The Shadow Queen’s clockwork handmaidens hypnotize Helena and transform her into a simulacrum of the Queen’s own dark daughter.
With a tip of the hat to Burt Bacharach and Karen Carpenter. Enjoy!
5 comments:
I also think that PAN'S LABYRINTH enjoyed more press and good will because Guillermo Del Toro's stock is rapidly rising in Hollywood so he's got a lot of buzz behind him.
Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman made this small little film and are clearly outsiders when it comes to Hollywood. Also, I don't think Sony promoted the film all that well or very much. I really love it too and when I heard these two were teaming up on a film I couldn't wait. It really is like one of their graphic novels come to life and I hope they make another film together.
"I don't think Sony promoted the film all that well or very much."
Promotion (and resultant award nominations) have everything to do with how much a studio has invested in a film in the first place. Benjamin Button may have been a turkey, but the studio promoted it relentlessly in an effort to recoup the film's $150 million budget. A $4 million art film like MirrorMask is dumped on the marketplace and left to fend for itself.
Well, you've sold me on Mirrormask. Part of what sells me is your take on Pan's Labyrinth. There were a number of things I didn't like about that movie, but the twee ending was certainly the capper. To paraphrase a possibly mythical comment on another fantasy, "Bring back my menacing faun!"
Nice points about the difficulty of absorbing singularity and strangeness, although for that same reason I need to revisit Pan's Labyrinth at some point just to make sure my reaction wasn't a failure to see its own singular strangeness. But so far del Toro hasn't really been my cuppa, even if I enjoyed the Hellboy movies somewhat more than Pan.
I too will partially concur with your take on Pan's Labyrinth. When I heard what the movie was about, I was very excited. The fantasy elements were great - particularly the monster with the eyeballs in his palms - but the depiction of the Spanish Civil War aftermath was cartoonish at best (a severe disappointment, as that period in history is one of the most fascinating to me) hence the expected and tantalizing discrepency between reality and fantasy was non-existent. And those Lord of the Rings-esque wipes didn't help.
Jerry, you very succinctly and pointedly explain the process between Hollywood "success." It's virtually all about marketing. I think if you could get outside forces involved in the promotion of non-Hollywood films, creating the proper buzz, industry titans would be shocked, SHOCKED to discover the audiences for supposedly "out-of-the-mainstream" fare. People are more curious and open-minded about art content than the business, and perhaps those same people, realize. Look at the way frat kids can talk about how "cool" There Will Be Blood was - a movie which theoretically would have been a niche art experience for in-the-know hipsters was pretty much accepted by the mainstream because it reached some mystical saturation point in which its weirdness because acceptable, like a court jester or something. Anything can happen.
At any rate, though, it's worth remembering that Shakespeare was very popular in his day (perhaps another example of what I discuss above, though this time in terms of the supposed turn-off of "sophistication" rather than "weirdness") and that often audiences crave something different, though their viewing habits tend to be complacent, borne of habit and preoccupation.
Movieman - There Will Be Blood is a great example of a genuinely singular work of art that somehow managed to find a mainstream audience. The marketing hook or entry point, if you will, was DDL's take-no-prisoners performance.
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