"eye-scorching screen candy"

Glenn Gaslin described the movie as an "eye-scorching screen candy, a
gorgeous effects driven fantasy flick" in E! online. the movie in questions is Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean's Mirrormask. he is absolutely right.
i've been waiting to get my hands on the DVD since i knew of the movie going into production. since it's one of those small company, low budget films without any famous stars, i was sure that it will never reach malaysian cinemas, and i was right.
well, not even that, none of the DVD shops that i asked at, since september last year, even heard about the film. so when i bumped into this in a DVD shop earlier in the evening, i just bought it and hurry home. :)
so. it really is eye candy right from the DVD menu to the ending credits.
as what i've mentioned in a previous post here, the movie is really filled with tons and tons of weirdly creative and brilliant ideas, both in the storyline and the audio visual presentation of it. if i'd not known beforehand that this movie was done on a very limited budget, i wouldn't have believed that this film actually only had a budget of four million dollars. just as a comparison, the first lord of the rings movie had a budget of 137 million. the acclaimed fantasy film labyrinth, from the same company as mirrormask, had 40 million.
seeing dave mckean's designs brought to live is a shocking experience. i'm talking about designs with similar color schemes and psychotic feeling as those from sandman comic covers. cats with human faces, fishes that swims through the air, orbiting giants... mixing that, with all the crazily original ideas from neil gaiman - flying books, a dumb sphinx, monkey-birds with beaks that keep falling off, shadows that turn into eyeballs with spidery legs... this is fantasy film at a whole new level. (which also kinda make me wonder what kind of movies will the sandman series make)
it's too bad that this film did not reach cinemas here.

mirrormask@sony pictures
traliers@apple

more pictures, which doesn't really reflect how marvellous things actually look in the movie: