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Contains mild peril and scary moments Comicbook legends Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman take a coming-of-age fairy tale and give it a dazzlingly original twist in MirrorMask. An adolescent Brighton girl is swept into a mind-bending parallel world, where she must brave all manners of beasties - gryphons, sphinxes, monkeybirds - and face the sinister Dark Queen, who intends to keep her there for good. Ingeniously made and endearingly played, this is fantasy cinema at its most richly creative and the first must-see family film of the year.
Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), the teenage daughter of Rob Brydon's circus master, is in the throes of teen rebellion - desperate to "run away and join real life". When her mother (Gina McKee) falls ill after a family row, Helena is transported to the Dark Lands, where she and the masked natives are under threat from the apocalyptic rages of the Dark Queen (McKee again) whose own, stroppier version of Helena has escaped and is raising teen hell back in the real world. Only by finding the fabled MirrorMask can Helena find her way back to normality.
"EYE-POPPING INVENTION"
So far, so fairy-tale. But this journey through the rabbit hole is brought to glorious life by the most ravishing computer generated characters and sets. They feel wholly hand-crafted: sketched, roughly hewn, a collage of delicate, evolving textures. The effect, with McKean's spiky artwork and the inimitable creature magic that the Jim Henson company bring, is mesmerising. MirrorMask evokes fantasy classics at every turn - Labyrinth, Yellow Submarine, Time Bandits, Spirited Away - and even when the narrative plods just a tiny bit, the constant, eye-popping invention proves an irresistible diversion.
