MirrorMask News
From Superhero Hype:
‘Antonello Blueberry’ wrote in from Italy about new MirrorMask clips that were shown by director Dave McKean.
Last week Dave McKean was in a little town near Rome to act as President of the International Jury for the animation Festival “Castelli animati”. While there (or better, here), he showed some of his past video works, music videos and shorts, and a couple of clips of MirrorMask. He introduced them saying he completed the movie only a couple of days earlier and telling how difficult it was doing such a complex movie on the shoestring budget they gave him.
The two sequences I saw were unbelievably stunning: the first one was a musical number in which golden robotic mannequins springing from some sort of carillon boxes, transform the young Helena, the main character of the movie, from a bland looking girl into a punk-like Alice in wonderland.
The second one was the attempt from the Queen of Shadows to capture Helena and her friend Valentine, trying to escape her. It starts with the Queen having a sort of meeting with some grotesque counsellors, when a little porcupine creature comes in to inform that Helena has fled.
Dave McKean himself acted as a model for the motion capture of the little porcupine.
Judging from those clips MirrorMask promises to be at least a visual orgy filled with beautiful monstrosities.
And Dave himself later told that he plans to adapt another collaboration with Neil Gaiman Signal to Noise as a movie.
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From the December 1, 2004 Daily Variety:
New films by Thomas Vinterberg, Don Roos, John Maybury, Rebecca Miller, Hal Hartley, Michael Hoffman, Kevin Bacon and Mike Binder are among the 24 titles set to unspool in the Premieres section of the 2005 Sundance Film Festival, which runs Jan. 20-30 in Park City, Utah…
… PREMIERES
“Mirrormask,” directed by Dave McKean and written by McKean and comics creator Neil Gaiman, a Henson Co. fantasy in which a 15-year-old girl can save a kingdom and return home by finding the fabled Mirrormask. Columbia/Screen Gems release stars Stephanie Leonidas, Jason Barry, Rob Brydon, Gina McKee and Stephen Fry…
MirrorMask is part of the non-competition slate at Sundance 2005; the full list of premieres is on their website
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From the 19 October Australian:
Purveyors of the fantastic should enjoy Mirrormask, the forthcoming fantasy film fresh from the fevered mind of Neil Gaiman, the creative genius behind the Sandman comic series. Sneak previews suggest Neil has gone has gone completely Hieronymous Bosch — conjuring surreal computer-generated landscapes inhabited by dirigible-like floating lifeforms, sumptuous digital sets and an array of bizarre Jim Henson puppet creatures.
Mirrormask is the tale of Helena, a 15 year old girl who enters the world in her dreams and becomes caught up in a struggle between the realms of two opposing magical queens. [They are] putting it together on a shoestring budget of $US4 million ($5.4 million), relying on a band of dedicated supporters working long hours.
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From the Publisher’s Lunch, weekly sales roundup, just to make it official:
Neil Gaiman and Coraline illustrator Dave McKean’s MirrorMask tie-ins, related to a Jim Henson Company film written by Gaiman and directed by McKean, an oversized complete script and storyboards with notes from the creators, as well as full-color art from the film, to William Morrow, for publication in summer 2005, plus a MirrorMask picture book illustrated with film art, to Harper Children’s, by Merrilee Heifetz at Writers House.