Mirrormask (2005) on Netflix
Fifteen-year-old Helena longs to leave her family's circus. When her mother falls ill, she enters a shadowed city of masked people with a sleeping queen and a stolen charm.
- Netflix3.4/5
- IMDb6.7/1024,442 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes54%
Trailer
Plot summary
Helena Campbell's family runs a circus, but she would rather be living an ordinary life; a heated argument with her mother Joanne about her future ends when Joanne collapses during a performance and is hospitalized. Helena stays with her grandmother and blames herself for her mother's illness. On the eve of the operation she wakes in a dream-like state and steps outside, where three performers appear; shadows consume two of them, and the juggler Valentine leads her to safety through flying books. She reaches the City of Light, whose masked citizens are fleeing the shadows. Taken for the Princess of the Land of Shadows, Helena is brought to the Prime Minister, who explains that the Princess took a charm from the White City, leaving the Queen of Light asleep and the city open to the Shadows.
Cast
- Nik Robsonas Pingo / Bing (as Nik Robinson)
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Mirrormask (2005)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- McKean said that one example of the spirit of the film is that they only had one peach during the filming of the scene where Valentine eats the future fruit.
- Production took seventeen months on a budget of $4 million, and McKean viewed the limit as a good thing: "It's very good to have a box to fight against, and to know where your limitations are."
- Working to a tight budget, McKean designed comparatively simple creatures and assigned entire sequences rather than tiny pieces to individual artists; all but two of the animators were straight from art school, almost all from Bournemouth, and they took half the class.
- McKean and Gaiman worked on the story and concepts for the film over a span of two weeks in February 2002 at the Henson family home.
