The coolest of the cool

Later this year, Dave McKean’s feature-length directoral debut, MirrorMask, will be released to theatres. Co-written by Neil Gaiman, with the score co-composed by Iain Ballamy, this promises to be one of the coolest movies ever made.

For those not familiar with Dave McKean, he is perhaps best known for his beautiful covers for Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series of graphic novels. He has also worked with Gaiman on numerous other comics and books, as well as his own graphic novel Cages (which truly lives up to the classification of “graphic novel”, at nearly 500 pages). He has also done cover art for numerous albums by such artists as Skinny Puppy, Download, Frontline Assembly, Michael Nyman, and Mícheál Ó Súilleabháin, among countless others. And that’s just scratching the surface of the work that this man has done.

While there are some scenes done “traditionally”, taking place in reality, the majority of the movie takes place in dreams. The website, trailer, and the rest of the promotional material would have you believe that the Jim Hensen Company is doing all of the computer work for that, but according to McKean, they didn’t even have the budget for them. Instead, the film’s effects are being done in a small studio space by himself and 16 other animators, using Photoshop and Maya.

Little else is known about the movie, aside from the cast and the synopsis. According to it, “MirrorMask is the story of Helena, a fifteen-year-old girl working for her family circus, who wishes—quite ironically—that she could run away from the circus and join real life. But such is not to be the case, as she finds herself on a strange journey into the Dark Lands, a fantastic landscape filled with giants, Monkeybirds and dangerous sphinxes. Helena searches for the Mirrormask, an object of enormous power that is her only hope of escaping the Dark Lands, waking the Queen of Light and returning home.”

At the time of this writing, the trailer appears to be unavailable (for whatever reasons—I was able to watch it just last night), but can be found elsewhere on the Internet in non-QuickTime formats. Either way, I would urge you to check out the website and definitely to see it once it’s released—you won’t be sorry.