SUBMITTED BY Lynnith

July 26, 2003 — I confess. I'm a MASSIVE Neil Gaiman fan, and it has nothing to do with my height! With more than 5 panels featuring him, for me this year's Comicon was akin to setting a crack addict loose in a DEA vault. I managed to spend most of my time this weekend attending his panels, meeting him (twice, woohoo!) and annoying the heck out of all the other CD editors.

The very first of Neil's panels I attended was one on MirrorMask that he shared with director Dave McKean and executive producers Lisa Henson and Michael Polis. It was incredibly informative, entertaining, and proved that this film is definitely one to watch for in 2004.

The plot of MirrorMask is classic Gaiman. It centers around Helena, a 15 year old girl in a family of circus entertainers who often wishes she could run off and join real life. After a fight with her parents regarding her future, her mother falls quite ill and Helena is convinced that it is all her fault. When she realises that her mother is on the eve of major surgery and no one bothered to tell her, she becomes even more upset. That night, she dreams that she is in a strange world containing two opposing queens, masked inhabitants, quite a few fish, and a chicken (both Gaiman and McKean emphasized this fact often). Even stranger is the way she is treated - like a princess. But all is not well in this new world; the white queen has fallen ill and can only be revived by the Mirror Mask. Accompanied by a feckless juggler named Valentine, Helena sets off to find it. But as her adventures continue, she begins to wonder whether she's in a dream or something far more sinister.

The cast of the film are headed by Stephanie Leonidas as Helena, Gina McKee as her mother and both the Dark and White Queens, Rob Brydon as Helena's father and the Prime Minister of the "dream world", and Jason Barry as Valentine.

MirrorMask came about, said Gaiman, due to the realisation on the part of Hensons that both Labyrinth and Dark Crystal sold well year after year. Gaiman and McKean were approached with a proposition they couldn't turn down - total artistic freedom to make a film together under the auspices of Hensons. The caveat? Only $4 million to make it, nowhere near the tens of millions it cost to make the prior two films.

Gaiman and McKean insist that this is not a problem. The freedom is worth it, they say, and from listening to them speak it sounded like they really enjoyed the creative aspect of finding new and cheaper ways to do things. Gaiman said that at one point during the scriptwriting process, he wanted to set a scene in a school but McKean told him that it was far too expensive. A city crumpling up like a piece of paper, he could do just fine - but a schoolroom wouldn't work at all! The expenses of location shooting led to only two weeks spent outside the studio's blue screen.

As filming just wrapped last week, we didn't get much in the way of footage - and nothing with any effects added in - but we were treated to five minutes of behind-the-scenes video from some of the blue screen shoots, which featured quite a bit of midair wirework. In addition to this, we were also shown still images of most of the characters and a few locations, looking (obviously) very similar to Dave McKean's other work in print and film. From the designs we were shown, I can safely predict that MirrorMask will be absolutely mindblowing.

The effects will all be done by McKean and a small company that he will be forming expressly for that purpose, which will both allow for direct control on his part and low expenditures. (In fact, they're currently looking to hire animators, computer artists, and 3D modellers - send resume details to mirrormask@henson.com if interested) They're planning on being finished with it all around the April timeframe, but there's no real word yet as to when in 2004 the film will be released to the general public. Supposedly it's slated to be direct-to-video, but rumor has it that a theatrical release is still a possibility.

In all, the panel was most impressive and leads me to believe that we'll be in for a treat come 2004. Until then, stay tuned to CountingDown for all the latest and greatest MirrorMask news!