I write this article fresh on the heels of my review of Freaked, which openly slammed into the use of excessive CGI in modern cinema. It may sound contradictory to now champion a movie that openly uses this method, but it is not. MirrorMask is the first family film to use this technique to its creative advantage, so after a dozen or so years of mindless trash, finally we get something beautiful.

Sure, there have been efforts. Poor efforts, but they have been there. Cats and Dogs used CGI to twist normal household pets into martial artists, but the movie wasn't particularly funny or smart, and ended up being fairly forgettable. Small Soldiers was neat-looking and had some good voice talents, but appealed only to younger male audiences, and even then, only marginally. I criticize even “Pixar,” while technically animation and not special effects, for not using their tools (often enough) to create films that are actually intoxicating environments, and instead attempt to make things that look increasingly “real.” Kids don't care about reality. We shouldn't try to make them care about it. Reality is what adults like me watch (family movies like Spy Kids and MirrorMask) to escape.

That said, MirrorMask is far from perfect. It's dialogue is borderline terrible, it's characters are flat, and it's plot is standard. I believe these problems to be Neil Gaiman's, as he is the story's initiator, creator, and screenwriter. At least he had the foresight to hire on an unknown in Dave McKean to direct his picture. McKean is someone I have little knowledge about, outside of creating some bizarre imagery on the cover of a few of my “Front Line Assembly” CD's. Somehow however, Gaiman found him, and McKean transformed an average script into a work of art. The look is as distinct in nature as Tim Burton's work used to be. At times during my viewing of MirrorMask, I was convinced that it was the most unique and creative world I had ever seen depicted on film.

So why aren't more movies attempting this? Why has it taken this long since the birth of mainstream CGI for a movie like MirrorMask to come along? Computers should have opened the door for inventiveness, not closed it to the idea. I hope that this movie spurns a fan base; a market for this type of ambition, so studios will finally revert back to the course of infinite possibility they seemed destined for in the 80's. I hope that Dave McKean will get to make many more films, and be the Tim Burton of this generation. He certainly deserves it. And so too, does today's youth.