The Dreaming » 2005 » October
Oct 30
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Anansi Boys Review – Houston Chronicle

From the October 28th Houston Chronicle:

There are certain books writers turn to for inspiration. Joseph Campbell’s Hero With a Thousand Faces garnered admirers (George Lucas being the most famous) who started tapping into age-old plots rather than plowing new narrative ground. Because of Campbell writers started seeing the cross-country trek in Easy Rider, for example, as a modern retelling of The Odyssey. Science fiction and fantasy writers especially took to Campbell because he allowed them to see themselves not as dime-store hacks but as working in the tradition of the Viking sagas and Beowulf.

Fantasy writer Neil Gaiman has made a career of telling modern myths, and he is not subtle about it. The hero of his Sandman graphic novel series is Morpheus, the King of Dreams. His urban fantasy American Gods portrays has-been deities of yore struggling to make ends meet on the harsh streets of the United States – the Mesopotamian fertility goddess is reduced to turning tricks, Odin gets by as a grifter. Gaiman’s latest, Anansi Boys, continues the tradition of mixing archaic mythology with the mundane modern day, this time focusing on the offspring of one of the down-on-their-luck deities from American Gods, Mr. Nancy.


Nancy’s son Charles Anansi is a sweet, reclusive administrative worker engaged to a woman who is saving herself until marriage. The reserved Charles always hated his father’s antics and never forgave the older man for saddling him with the nickname “Fat Charlie” despite his not being overweight. Charlie appears on the verge of having the quiet, predictable life he craves when his caddish and unruly father creates one final embarrassment by keeling over dead in a karaoke bar, groping a woman as he tumbles off the stage.


In the end Anansi Boys winds up sharing less with Campbell’s Hero than with Lewis Hyde’s Trickster Makes This World, a book beloved by such writers as Margaret Atwood and Michael Chabon for its celebration of the irreverent.


After mistakenly giving the eulogy at the wrong funeral, Charlie discovers that his father was actually the spider god Anansi, the trickster figure of West African and Caribbean mythology. He also learns he has a long-lost brother, Spider, who appears to have inherited both Anansi’s magical abilities and his way with the ladies. Spider crawls out of the woodwork and moves, uninvited, into Charlie’s flat.


What Hyde and Gaiman understand is that in fairy tales, which tend to break the world into stark contrasts of good and evil, the trickster interests us because he is both and neither. He sits on the moral border, using mischief to spin gray. As soon as things start looking clear, the trickster reminds us of the complex and the absurd.


Using magic to convince people he is Charlie, Spider blackmails Charlie’s boss and makes moves on his fiancé. Though Charlie is harmless and true, he seems cursed to live in the shadow of his father and brother whose impertinence makes them the life of the party. As Charlie learns the hard way, people always prefer the cocky Han Solo to the wide-eyed Luke. But soon Charlie learns how to make trouble of his own.


Half the pleasure of reading Gaiman comes from his lighthearted prose. You’re either amused by it or not, and I was. The other half comes from Gaiman’s inventiveness. His work resists categorization (Gaiman calls it a magical-horror-thriller-ghost-romantic-comedy-family-epic). Gaiman not only taps into our collective unconscious, as Campbell calls for, but reinvents our myths. In this respect Gaiman is more in the spirit of Hyde, who saw artists as society’s trickster figures. Far from serious, they often approach their work with playfulness and humor. And they challenge our deeply held assumptions about what should be. They set out to do what you’re not supposed to do, thereby, ironically, showing you how it’s done.


Gaiman is a trickster in the best sense of the word. He’s written another novel that fantasy writers will turn to for lessons on how to misbehave.
–Dylan Otto Krider


Mirrormask Review – Miami New Times
From the October 27th Miami New Times:

To the knowledgeable comic book fan, all one need say about MirrorMask is that it was scripted by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean, with a final product that, while less plot-heavy than most of Gaiman’s writing, faithfully adapts McKean’s unique drawing/collage style into three dimensions. Since those who aren’t comic fans are likely unfamiliar with Gaiman and McKean, describing the sheer individuality at hand presents a greater challenge. How about this: If you were to hit yourself quite hard in the head, then walk into the Museum of Modern Art, where you could literally enter the paintings as all the sculptures came to life and started talking with British accents, you might approximate the world of MirrorMask. Put another way: When Tim Burton manages to see this movie, he’ll realize he just got owned. Gaiman and McKean’s mandate from the Jim Henson Company was to create something in a similar vein to The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, movies that bombed on initial release but have steadily grown in popularity over the years. Because of the strong possibility that a new Henson fantasy might similarly swan-dive at the box office only to recoup on DVD, the budget allotted to MirrorMask was a mere $4 million. Still, thanks to a lack of time constraints, the precedent set by the likes of Robert Rodriguez, and a team of young and hungry computer animators, McKean has made an astounding feature directorial debut that looks as amazing as anything onscreen this year. The word masterpiece, so often inappropriately abused by those bereft of a thesaurus and a sense of perspective, would not be out of place here. Not everything looks realistic, but not everything is supposed to. Like McKean’s illustrations, the movie combines drawings, photos, hazy filters, superimpositions, and computer effects into a pastiche both beautiful and disturbing. Those who criticize MirrorMask will likely decry its relative lack of plot ? basically, the daughter of two circus performers enters a dream world in which she must find the eponymous mask in order to trade places with an evil goth doppelg?er who has replaced her back in reality (the evil substitute could easily be taken as a sarcastic parody of the typical Gaiman fan). Indeed, the script follows dream logic, which is to say that things proceed simply because they do, with characters occasionally figuring out the next step without explanation. But it works, in large part because the pacing and the dialogue are also delivered as if in a dream. That, and occasional doses of Monty Pythonesque humor to show that Gaiman and McKean don’t take this too seriously (comic actors like Stephen Fry and Lenny Henry provide voices for some of the creatures). At any rate, it’s a much better-acted, better-performed story than The Dark Crystal, and it isn’t burdened with the pathetic ending and forgettable songs of Labyrinth; the only musical number here is the most disturbing rendition of Burt Bacharach’s “Close to You” that you’ll ever hear. Not to say that the soundtrack is perfect: McKean has an unfortunate fondness for jazz saxophone during the first half of the story. Those hoping that his artistic collaborations with the likes of Tori Amos and Alice Cooper would pay dividends will be disappointed. Ah, but why worry about that. When you buy this thing on DVD, you can turn the sound down and crank your own tunes; very little of the overall effect will be lost. Funnily enough, at one point, our heroine, Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), is given a crucial piece of advice: “Get higher.” She can’t imagine what it means, but you can hazard your own interpretation. It’s interesting that the female lead is named Helena, because Leonidas is reminiscent of a young Helena Bonham Carter, and if this movie is any indication of future output, they’ll probably share a fan base. Like most of the cast, the actress does double duty, playing Helena and Evil Helena. Notting Hill’s Gina McKee plays not only Helena’s mother but also the dream world’s Queen of Light and Queen of Shadows. Jason Barry is the most impressive of the bunch, playing Irish-accented juggler Valentine from behind a mask that covers the upper half of his face while stealing the show nonetheless. McKean and Gaiman are influenced in their story by the best. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and The Neverending Story are blatant founts of inspiration, as is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy ? Helena spends almost the entire adventure in her pajamas. Hayao Miyazaki may not have been as direct a source, but both Howl’s Moving Castle and MirrorMask feature a fortress on bird legs that owes much to Terry Gilliam. Some of this stuff, though, is its own thing ? the human-faced sphinxes, for example, or the anthropomorphic porcupine character who shows up near the end. This is a film that cries out for action figures; why aren’t there any?
–Luke Y. Thompson


Mirrormask Review – Toronto Sun
From the Toronto Sun:

In an era of cinema where anything seems possible, assuming that filmmakers spend enough on the digital special effects, MirrorMask is a rarity.

It is so fresh, so bold and so fantastical on the visual plane that it seems to re-invent the language of dreams and widen the possibilities of fantasy storytelling.

Dave McKean’s film does so to chronicle a 15-year-old British girl’s harrowing, coming-of-age journey. Everything we see in the heightened, surreal world that is presented on screen is a product of the girl’s fertile imagination and her remarkable artistic abilities.

The paradox of how new this looks is that there are dozens of references to the familiar.

In the realm of children’s literature and/or movies, MirrorMask invokes fare ranging from The Wizard Of Oz to Alice In Wonderland, Labyrinth and the underappreciated 1988 drama Paperhouse (a connection made by sharp U.S. critic Roger Ebert, who recognized the dangerous trap that a dreamscape can become).

In the realm of fine art, MirrorMask employs images that suggest the work of Michelangelo, Chagall, Max Ernst, Picasso and even contemporary filmmaker-artists such as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam.

This could turn into a toxic stew in the wrong hands. But graphic artist and director McKean, working with collaborator Neil Gaiman on the story and screenplay, delivers a breathtaking phantasmagoria.

And it has meaning. The core story has weight and substance, even if there are repetitive passages.

The central figure is the girl (a charismatic Stephanie Leonidas, channeling Helena Bonham Carter in her youth). She is a jack-of-many-trades in her parents’ one-ring circus. While most kids want to run away to join the circus, our heroine wants to run away to join real life.

One day, her resentment slides into cruelty. She tells her mother (the lustrous and versatile Gina McKee) that she wishes her dead. Her mother falls deathly ill.

At this point, not surprisingly, the girl escapes into her fantasy world, a quixotic land of good and evil, of dark and light, of creatures so bizarre that the girl does not even recognize how she could have conjured them.

In the fantasyland, Leonidas must find an elusive, rare object, the mirrormask, both to save the Queen of the City of Light from a dire fate and to stave off the gathering forces of darkness. Meanwhile, she catches glimpses of her own destructive alter ego.

Similar to The Wizard Of Oz, the human characters in the fantasy are variations on people from the girl’s reality — and that is reflected in the casting. McKee plays both the good and bad queens. Rob Brydon is both the girl’s real father and the prime minister of the City of Light. Jason Barry plays the selfish juggler Valentine who helps the girl on her quest and then figures into her real life.

The fantastical parts of MirrorMask do wear viewers out. You need patience and faith that contrivances in the plot will disappear. In addition, the real-life ending to the film seems oddly flat, but that may be because of the intensity of the journey.

Yet, no matter how the prism is turned, MirrorMask is unique and dazzling in its surreal show of light.

BOTTOM LINE: Individual dreamscapes may leave you squirming or puzzled but the overall movie has such dazzling phantasmagoria that it holds you enthralled.
–Bruce Kirkland


Clippings

Additional Anansi Boys reviews appear in the Bookreporter, The Malaysia Star and the Sydney Morning Herald.

Additional Mirrormask reviews appear in the Tacoma (Washington) News Tribune, the Arizona Republic, the Globe and Mail, the Vancouver Westender, Toronto Star, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Sarasota Herald Tribune, and the Downtown NY Express.

Oct 26
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Stardust Film News

From the October 25th Daily Variety:

Paramount is in final negotiations with Brit filmmaker Matthew Vaughn (Layer Cake) to direct and produce his adaptation of Neil Gaiman’s adult fairy tale Stardust. Vaughn penned the script with writing partner Jane Goldman.

Gaiman’s novel, first published in 1997 as Stardust: Being a Romance Within the Realms of Faerie, is set in a town in the English countryside where the magical and mortal mix. Story’s centered on a young man who promises his beloved that he’ll retrieve a fallen star by venturing into the magical realm, where he has to contend with witches, goblins, gnomes, talking animals and evil trees.

Stardust, which won the 1999 Mythopoeic Award for adult novel, was originally set up at Dimension. The feature project’s being developed with the goal of tapping into veins of fantasy and comedy akin to those in The Princess Bride and The Neverending Story.

Par co-prexy of production Brad Weston is overseeing the project.

Vaughn produced and made his directorial debut on gritty gangster thriller Layer Cake, starring Daniel Craig. He was attached earlier this year to direct the third X-Men but left the project. Gaiman was the creator-writer of the DC Comics series Sandman. He’s co-written the script for Beowulf, the performance-capture adaptation to be directed by Robert Zemeckis and produced by Steve Bing’s Shangri-La Entertainment.
–Dave McNary, Nicole Laporte

Many other news sites are weighing in with their views on the film, including Empire and, not surprisingly, AICN.


Feature – Oakland Tribune

From the September 29th Oakland Tribune:

As a 5-year-old kid, recalls Neil Gaiman, he was haunted by one particular nightmare, a vision so horrid he’d wake up trembling, drenched in sweat.

“I had this recurring dream that I was in this enormous house filled with evil witches. And there was one witch who was willing to protect me, while all of the others wanted to kill and eat me. And I still remember every bit, just how terrifying it was,” he says.

Somewhere along the way, however, Gaiman began to embrace that fear, even revel in it.

As the British-bred, now Minnesota-based author gradually left journalism for a freefall into comics, he started keeping a notebook on his bedside table. By the time he was scripting his first breakthrough title for DC’s Vertigo imprint – the stunning 50-book [50 book? 75 issues, perhaps? - la ] series Sandman, whose surreal covers were all illustrated by his friend Dave McKean – Gaiman had the technique down pat.

“Once I started doing Sandman, suddenly it all changed,” he says. ” … Part of me would be like, ‘Oh, that’s great! I can use that!’ And I would be so excited. And I rapidly stopped having nightmares after that.”

Instead, Gaiman took to conjuring up nightmares for his cultlike readership. Sandman set the neo-Gothic pace. Drawn by several guest artists to resemble a speed-addled Robert Smith, the ghostly-pale Morpheus hung out with his Siouxsie Sioux-ish kid sister Death and presided over a land of dreams and nightmares.

The early-’90s title regularly sold more than a million copies a year, and it would go on to win the Will Eisner Comic Industry Awards for Best Writer. Later, Gaiman moved into novels: Good Omens, Neverwhere, the New York Times best-seller American Gods, and his new Harper-Collins spinoff Anansi Boys.

Currently, Gaiman is juggling several projects. Warner Bros. nabbed the film rights to Death: The High Cost of Living; his children’s book Coraline has gone into production; his novella The Wolves in the Walls will soon be staged by the Scottish National Theatre Company, and his twisted screenplay for Beowulf, starring Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie, has started shooting.

Opening today is MirrorMask, a film penned for McKean, who co-wrote the original story and also directs. Aided by CGI and special effects from the Jim Henson Company, the duo has built a sprawling dreamscape city worthy of Sandman himself.

On the surface, MirrorMask is a simple morality play, a cautionary Pandora’s box tale of a young English girl, Helena (Stephanie Leonidas) who wants to quit the traveling circus of her demanding mother Gina (the underrated Gina McKee).

When mom is hospitalized, facing a life-or-death operation, her daughter drifts into sleep, then a daguerrotype dreamworld where cats talk, books act as flying carpets and fish dart through the air. Soon, Helena discovers that the Queen Of Light (McKee) lies comatose while her realm crumbles around her, and that only a mythical Mirrormask can undo the spell cast by the Queen Of Shadows (again, McKee). Meanwhile, a shadowy Anti-Helena has escaped into the real world, with no plans of returning to captivity.

Has Gaiman’s spectral vision finally made it to the big screen?

He says, “From my perspective, it was much more about trying to realize Dave McKean’s vision. Dave has his story credit on there, and it was really a matter of me and Dave sitting and both of us having stuff that we brought to it. And in this case, Dave wanted to do the dream stuff, and I was the one going ‘Oh, Dave, not again – everybody expects dream stuff from me.’ So I was the one who brought in things to try and confuse it a little, like the other Helena. But I think what Dave did with it is brilliant, absolute magic.”

It’s true. In McKean’s imagination, a cat with a geometrically-configured body and a flicker-filmed human face can not only ask Helena riddles, but also be confounded by return questions itself.

McKean keeps dream diaries, too, he says. “And they go straight into my work. A great chunk of MirrorMask, at the beginning with the circus family and the mom falling ill, came straight out of a dream. I just wrote it down verbatim and e-mailed it to Neil.”

The strange city that Helena explores is McKean’s city. He says, “It’s all the little bits of all the European cities that I love, like Venice.”

McKean, who was so beaten down by unexpected directorial demands that he “can’t look at this film without seeing all the things” he would do differently, relies on natural objects in his paintings and collage work – wood, cloth, leaves.

MirrorMask revolves around the same natural textures: elaborate feathered costumes, floating rock-formation creatures, jagged granite stalagmites personifying evil.

The storyline has deeper roots, too. Roots that extend all the way to fatherhood. McKean’s daughter just turned 12, he says. “She’s going from being a girl to a young woman, and also deciding who she is in the world, which path she’s going to follow.”

Gaiman, whose offspring Holly is 20, agrees. “And it’s a wonderful weird thing being dad to a daughter,” he says. “Because they oscillate between being seven and being 25, and you just have to sort of hold on tight and go along with it.”
–Tom Lanham


Feature – DC Examiner

From the September 29th Washington DC Examiner

When people call you “The Dream King,” they usually do so for a good reason. And that’s how it is with Neil Gaiman, the award-winning comic writer who for years penned the adventures of Morpheus, a dream king of a different kind, in The Sandman.

Not surprisingly, MirrorMask, the new film by Gaiman and his Sandman collaborator Dave McKean being shown exclusively at the E Street Cinema downtown, also delves into a dream world: When Helena (Stephanie Leonidas), the daughter of two circus performers, lashes out against her mom (Gina McKee), who later ends up in the hospital, she is transported to a fantasy plane ruled by a white queen and dark queen and populated with wonderful, colorful characters and creatures.

Gaiman and McKean (the screenwriter and director, respectively) were contacted by the Jim Henson Company to make a family movie along the lines of cult ’80s classics like Labyrinth and The Dark Crystal for $4 million, and Gaiman helped him write this Alice-in-Oz story.

“With MirrorMask, I don’t see it as a Neil Gaiman film. I see it as a Dave McKean film that I got to work with Dave on to help him realize his vision. Dave had a very specific kind of film he wanted to make,” says Gaiman, whose latest novel, Anansi Boys, will debut at No. 1 on The New York Times best-seller list next week.

While most people will think that the whole dream aspect comes from Gaiman’s imagination, that was actually McKean’s idea, according to the writer. The scene where Helena plays a game with a gryphon (who happens to have a human head) is much more his style.

“That I think is quintessential me: It’s odd, it’s funny, it’s weird,” Gaiman, 44, says. “The idea of doing Sphinxian riddle games but all upside down and back to front and doing them with kids riddles that don’t have proper answers – if that’s not trademark me, then it’s at least a very me-ish moment.”

Sandman, MirrorMask and others of his writings have dreams as a purveying thematic device, and Gaiman is fascinated by them because it’s one thing that everybody has in common.

“Each person in the world, no matter how strange and dull or weird or normal, closes their eyes at night and goes quietly stark staring mad,” Gaiman explains. “And I think that’s so cool and so magical. You get the idea that everybody has a world within them and there are worlds within worlds and worlds within people.”

As he’s grown older, surprisingly because of his occupation, his dreams have actually become less inspiring.

“When I was in my 20s, I used to have terrible nightmares, and they persisted into the early days of Sandman, ” Gaiman says. “But the trouble was with ‘Sandman,’ every time I woke up from a terrifying nightmare, I’d go, ‘Oh, that’s so great! I can use that!’ And I’d be so thrilled and jot it down, and within a couple weeks they stopped happening. I started losing the whole nightmare thing. I felt like all the little nightmares that were actually working very hard to give me nightmares didn’t feel I was being properly appreciative and not somebody who would wake up properly screaming.”

These days, Gaiman’s twilight journeys are mostly good ones – if not odd, too. “I think all good dreams are odd,” he concludes. “But then I think the world is odd.”
–Brian Truitt

Oct 25

From Blair Marnell’s All The Rage column:

Neil Gaiman has been writing professionally for over twenty years, with a laundry list of hit novels and comics including, Sandman, Death: The High Cost of Living, The Books of Magic, Good Omens, and American Gods. His latest novel, Anansi Boys has recently been released to great fanfare, while his latest film, MirrorMask is currently in limited release. Additionally, his next film, Beowulf just began principle photography. Recently, Gaiman took the time to answer some questions about The Eternals, his newly announced miniseries for Marvel, along with what his future comic plans may be.

Blair Marnell: First off, congratulations for Anansi Boys landing on top of the New York Times Best Sellers List.

Neil Gaiman: Thank you. It’s a bit of a dazing sort of experience. Like being hit by a very wonderful car.

BM: The word is out that you’re doing The Eternals for Marvel. Can you tell us how that came about?

NG: 1602 was always the first half of a two project thing. I didn’t know what project number two was going to be. Various things over the last couple of years have been suggested, we’ve gone backwards and forwards on it. I kept being amused, because I kept reading on a number of websites, I think including yours, what my next project was definitely going to be. And people would write to me and say, “Well, the secret is out. You’re definitely writing the X-Men. Why don’t you come clean about it?” And I’d say, “Cause I’m not. This is the first I’ve heard of it.” [laughs]

I think Rich Johnston managed at least two, perhaps three exposés of what project number two was going to be. In each case, I’d have to write and say “That’s not actually true.” The nearest one to being true, was at one point, Craig Russell and I were talking about taking over Thor, to get Thor working again. Craig and I talked about it, but really just couldn’t make it work in schedules. Then they wanted to get on with Thor so that kind of carried on without us. Or didn’t.

Then I was in New York in June, and Joe Quesada said “Look, what about The Eternals? Do you remember The Eternals?” I said “Oh my God, yes!” I read them as they came out back in the seventies. And even at the time, you sort of went, “Okay, there is something going on here. This is so Kirby.” But you also felt that it was late stage Kirby. It was Jack creating something with bits of things that went back to New Gods and bits of his 2001 comic and also bits of things like his designs for the Lord of Light theme park, that he did (it was designed but never made). All of that was the kind of stuff going in there. It was also a comic book that never seemed to know if it was in the Marvel universe or not. I remember noticing that when I was fifteen or sixteen when I was reading it. “Is this Marvel or isn’t it? Here you have some S.H.I.E.LD. agents and in the next issue it seems to be explicit that Marvel characters only exist in comics.” Then it never really finished, it just sort of died out and half-heartedly incorporated into the Marvel universe but never really seemed to jell. Bits of it did, bits of it didn’t. I thought that it would be a really fun project, so I said “Sure, I think I’ll do that.”

BM: What is that makes the Eternals special in a world that already has mutants, superheroes and supervillains?

NG: I think what makes them special is that they are neither mutants nor superheroes or supervillains. What I think is so interesting is that they are people. They have superpowers and some of them even have costumes, but fundamentally they’ve been undercover a very long time. And they are people who have cool God-like magical powers but they’re still “us,” only they are “us” without assured death in the same way. That’s one of the things I want to address and play around with. Plus, you know it’s got the Deviant characters, which again, is one of those weird wonderful Kirby concepts of “There is always a darkness to the light.” I look at it and go “I’m not sure it’s that simple.” And I’m not sure that’s necessarily how I’m going to play it.

BM: Funny thing is, I think the Deviants have appeared more often in the Marvel Universe than the Eternals have.

NG: Well, yes. And you can sort of see why. I would love to have lived in the universe in which Jack got to do the Eternals comic book that he had in his head with no editorial interference and nobody second guessing him and not having any restraints to keep him from finishing the story he started. To have the done The Eternals on the scale of what he did with the Fourth World stuff. I think that would be a wonderful universe to live in.

I am not Jack Kirby. And I am not even going to try and attempt that. What I’m going to try to do is essentially take the universe he created, the characters he created, the ideas that he created and strip them down and put them back together again. As far as I’m concerned, one of the great things about comics is that you’re always allowed to dump the bits you don’t like. Then the deal that comes with that is that the people who come in next are allowed to dump the bits that you did that they don’t like. So I get to try to retrofit the Eternals and see what’s interesting about them from my perspective and to try to create characters that add value to the Marvel Universe. Like going into the playground and leaving some good toys behind. I like the idea that other people can then come along and play with those toys. Frankly, if what I do doesn’t work, or if what I do only works if I’m doing it (which is also a possibility) it’s perfectly possible that people will go “You know, those toys that Neil left are crap. Let’s go back trying to play with other people’s versions of the Kirby toys and see if we can do something else.” And I wouldn’t mind that at all. That’s part of the joy and tragedy of comics.

Originally, I thought it was only the tragedy of comics, but doing Sandman I discovered it was also the joy. You could take these things and mostly treat them with respect but sometimes treat them with respect from the point of view that “This is true, but you didn’t know about it.” With The Eternals, I feel like I’ve been given a weird permission to do more than I would normally do. In taking over existing comic characters, I would normally be incredibly respectful, but very specifically with The Eternals, I look at what Jack did and I went “This is not part of the Marvel Universe. Except maybe it sort of is.” Since then, people other than Jack have tried to fold it into the Marvel Universe, with various degrees of success. Or lack of success. “Well, this character was actually an Eternal, or a son of an Eternal.” And then it ets to the point when you’ve got Zuras meeting Zeus and you go, “How did you get to there? You’ve got Gods in the Marvel Universe and you’ve got characters who inspired the Gods in the Marvel Universe that both somehow exist side by side. But that doesn’t work.” There have been various attempts to reconcile that but most of that stuff I’m not even going to try and reconcile. What I’m going to do is pick the bits that I like and start something new.

BM: Tell us about some of your plans for The Eternals. How are you going to integrate them into the Marvel Universe. And are there any characters in particular that you’ll be using?

NG: No.

BM: No?

NG: No!

BM: Okay.

NG: Good try, but I mean no. When I’ve got it all figured out, maybe I’ll talk about it. Or maybe I’ll make people wait until it happens. I don’t know. A lot of this has to do with the fact that I don’t like the way so much information is around on the web so long before things come out. Because people like to discuss them, long before they come out, long before they’re even thought about and decide what they think about them long before the first word has actually been written. However, it’s so much more fun (that’s the whole point of monthly comics, as far as I’m concerned) to keep as much secret as possible before you go public so that people can actually have many cool surprises when they go down to the comic store. And I hate the idea of talking about a comic that won’t come out I think, for a year. The first issue will probably be on sale in eleven months time. We want to do the same thing we did with 1602, which is have most of it done, or in my case, have most or all of it written before it starts coming out. I hate this thing in monthly comics where issues one and two come out on time, issue three comes out a bit late, issue four comes out very late, issue five comes out shortly after the deadline for it to be returnable and then people laugh at you when you come in and ask where issue six is. We almost made it with 1602, issue eight was late because it was an extra length issue and there were a few problems so we wound up skipping.

BM: Well, maybe you can answer this. What is it about The Eternals that appeals to you?

NG: Oddly enough, people keep going “Oh! It’s the God thing, isn’t it? You must love people who are mistaken for Gods.” No, it’s not, because I feel that I’ve done that in lots of different ways. What I love is doing stories about people. what attracts me to it is the idea of people with incredibly long life spans and doing these comics about people who are functionally immortal. People for whom time moves very differently and how things have changed over the years. I want to start creating the idea of the Eternals as a group and watch things change over time. Somebody who might have been your best friend two thousand years ago is your bitterest enemy a thousand years on from that. Or the way that a romance that happened ten thousand years ago can affect things happening fifty years ago. The idea of a hidden hand in human history, hidden agendas across human history. I really like the idea of playing with that. I think there are going to be some mysteries in it. I have some ideas for things that are going to happen that I hope you are not going to be able to figure out why they’ve happened or what was actually going on until the last issue. By that point, they won’t mean the things they did at the beginning, I suppose an example of the kind of thing I mean that somebody else once did, was when Alan (Moore) killed the Comedian. By the time we figured out who killed the Comedian.

BM: It wasn’t important anymore.

NG: Right, it’s not that important anymore, because “Oh my God, this is what’s actually happening.” The thing is what takes you into it. And the things that happen to Ikaris at the beginning of issue one are going to propel you through the rest of the series, I hope.

BM: Any plans for the Celestials to show up in the series?

NG: I’m trying to figure out what I’m doing with the Celestials. Again, the Celestials are one of those things where you look at something and you go “Okay, it wasn’t built to be part of the Marvel Universe. It was built to be part of a Kirbyverse that was going on at the time.” Because, apart from anything else, there’s no way that a thousand foot high alien can come stand on the Earth and say “I’m going to be here for fifty years deciding whether I should blow it up or end the experiment” and the heroes wouldn’t come out in force. None of them did because they weren’t in that universe. But then the Celestials have been folded into the Marvel Universe now, so what am I going to do with them? But what’s nice is that I get to do a story that’s going to take place over a very long time and there will be, you know, Hot Celestial Action in it.

BM: Do you have any idea how long the miniseries will be?

NG: I’m planning for six issues, probably with longer than twenty two pages in each issue though.

BM: Any word on the artist?

NG: Yes.

BM: That you can share?

NG: No, I. I wish I could, but I can’t. There are some cool art plans that when people hear about them, I think it will make them go “Oh, that’s cool.” But again, I can’t share them at this point.

BM: Given your success in other media, will The Eternals be the last comic you do for the foreseeable future?

NG: I don’t know. My troubles are with time, not with things that I want to do. The novel readers would like it if I gave everything else up and did nothing but write novels for the rest of time. And the comic people would like me to do comics. It’s Sandman’s twentieth birthday in 2009, and I think I’m very much likely to do stuff for that. If only because it’ll make me feel really old. But it might be in 2008. Sandman #1 was published in November 1988, but with a cover date of January 1989. So I get to pick which is the twentieth anniversary. It’ll probably be 2009 just because I’ll be running late. I’m terrified to say that about something four years away! [laughs] But it’s true.

We did Endless Nights, which was enormously fun. I wanted to do a big pretty book and I got to do the thing. But having the first mainstream comics published original graphic novel on The New York Times’ Bestseller List. That was enormously fun and enormously satisfying to have done. Having said that, I can’t see much point in doing it again having done it. I would be much more likely to do the equivalent of a six or eight issue miniseries than I would to do an original book. It’s something that DC Comics knows I would like to do and I know they’d like me to do something. It’s not immediate so we’re worrying about different things.

The next thing that will be fun, and I don’t even know if I’m allowed to say this, but seeing that I’ve been so incredibly unhelpful on things I do know that I’m not allowed to talk about yet (laughs), I will give you one thing. I haven’t been told not to say, so I will give you something that is technically an exclusive, which is the last thing I heard that they are definitely doing is an Absolute Sandman. Because frankly, the first twenty odd issues of Sandman (in particular, but there’s more running through) were colored for a process that hasn’t been used for twenty years on that old paper stock. And now the paper stock is amazing, the print process is amazing and we’re still using the colors which look worse and worse with every printing. That’s not satisfactory. We’ve always known we needed to recolor the first two graphic novels and maybe the first couple issues of Dream Country. Steve Oliff took over on Sandman 19 and 20 and made it beautiful but at that point it was a computerized process. We’ve always wanted to recolor those and that I think, is incentive enough. The question is how are we going to do it and what will the Absolute Sandman be? For example, I don’t know whether the physical mechanics of book production will actually allow for a two thousand page book. A complete Sandman book would probably look like something encyclopedia sized. On the other hand, it would be a really cool object. And you could kill somebody if you hit them with it.

BM: It’s good to have a hobby.

NG: Absolutely. You could look at people straining themselves to pick it up saying “Oh my God. This is the whole of Sandman.” But quite what it will be. I don’t think we’ve come to that conclusion yet. But I have heard from Paul Levitz that it’s definitely going to be happening.

Oct 23
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Coraline selected for Book Club

Coraline has been chosen for the Mayor’s Book Club by Springfield, Illinois Mayor Tim Davlin. The Lincoln Library has more information on the program on their website, and will have “book chats” at their branches on Wednesday, November 9, 2005, and Monday, November 14, 2005.

The State Journal-Register will be publishing reader submitted reviews; more info is available on their website


Anansi Boys Review – The Age (Melbourne, Australia)
From the 22 October Age:

There is a problem with “genre”. All enveloping terms such as crime or science fiction are anathema to many. They’re not serious fiction. Regardless of the grudging acceptance by the literary world of James Ellroy or William Gibson, commercial classification remains a stigma.

The worst one of all is that horrific appellation fantasy, a world definitely for dweebs or, at best, “young adults”.

Sadly, this is the realm that Neil Gaiman finds himself in again and again. But then Gaiman is something of a shape shifter at the best of times. He writes children’s books, graphic novels or comics (which are more adult than a lot of mainstream fodder; his Sandman series has become a cornerstone of that genre) and dabbles in film (the soon to be released MirrorMask). But it is as a novelist that Gaiman is at his strongest.

Gaiman’s last novel, the epic American Gods, told the story of the fate of the “old” gods, who found themselves imported to the new world of America via ship loads of immigrants. Set in the United States of today, their relevance has gradually faded. The “new” gods are high tech, the internet and the television. The old gods of Welsh and Nordic mythology are reduced to pan-handling or petty crime, whoring and begging for survival. American Gods was infused with an element of melancholy, a nostalgia for more “romantic” belief systems.

Gaiman’s latest offering has many of the same elements, but he has replaced nostalgia with a kind of ribald British humour. His central character, Fat Charlie, isn’t even fat. He’s just a fairly dull bookkeeper in a boring job, engaged to a woman whose mother gives him hell. His father gave him the nickname “fat” and it stuck.

There was a reason for that. Unbeknown to Charlie, his father was a god; indeed, the god of trickery, Anansi.

Anansi’s tricks don’t end when he dies early in the book. His death reveals that Fat Charlie has a brother who has inherited Anansi’s god-like powers and is, accordingly, something of a lazy but charming swindler. Meeting his brother turns Charlie’s world upside down and inside out.

Gaiman’s London is very like the city portrayed in the novels of Will Self or Martin Amis – in other words, essentially boring. The city comes to life in the exploits of its myriad characters. Gaiman goes a bit further than his contemporaries in finding ways to escape the urban horror of a grey city.

As the usually timid Charlie explodes someway into the book: “In the last two weeks I’ve been arrested, I’ve lost my fiancee and my job, I’ve watched my semi-imaginary brother get eaten by a wall of birds in Piccadilly Circus, I’ve flown back and forth across the Atlantic like some kind of lunatic trans-Atlantic ping-pong ball, and today I got up in front of an audience and I, and I sang because my psycho ex-boss had a gun barrel against the stomach of the girl I’m having dinner with.”

But at that stage the story is only just getting going. Gaiman manages to explore the world of timeless deities and also the complex nature of familial and romantic relationships. Charlie is delighted to find his brother, Spider, at first. The two then bicker like crazy until Spider is attacked by Tiger, the ferocious entity of Caribbean mythology and Charlie is forced to accept his own powers of persuasion.

Anansi Boys is a rollicking adventure with a powerful sense of humanity infusing every page.

It may be dubbed fantasy but in its timeless delight in telling a well-rounded yarn of Gods and average folk in a less than average situation, Gaiman proves himself an equal to the Trickster God.
– Ashley Crawford


Anansi Boys Review – The Dallas Morning News

From the October 16th Dallas Morning News:

A few years ago I gave a friend one of Neil Gaiman’s novels.

“What kind of book is it?” he asked. I was dumbfounded how to reply and just insisted he read it.

Mr. Gaiman’s novels aren’t easy to catalog.

He writes about everything from ancient empires buried beneath the streets of London (Neverwhere, 1996) to modern folks who sell their souls for fame and fortune (American Gods, 2001).

His stories usually have a bit of fantasy, mystery and history blended into a sprightly tale. That’s certainly the case with his latest book, Anansi Boys.

It’s the story of a young man named Charlie, who works in a London investment office and has his life planned out. But then his father dies, and Charlie flies to Florida for the funeral and reconnects with his past.

The demise of the father he never liked opens the door to a new world of revelation and revolution. Charlie finds out that not only was his father a god – yes, that’s what I said – but that he has a brother, too.

Like American Gods, Anansi Boys explores the uneasy relationship between mankind and our gods.

“Human beings do not like being pushed around by gods,” Mr. Gaiman writes. “They may seem to, on the surface, but somewhere on the inside underneath it all, they sense it and they resent it.”

That’s certainly the case for Charlie, who was embarrassed by his father’s endless pranks and quickly feels less than brotherly love for his newfound sibling, Spider. Especially after Spider seduces Charlie’s fiancée, and gets Charlie fired and put in jail. Suddenly having a brother isn’t such a good thing.

But how to get rid of him? The old adage “be careful what you wish for” turns out to be painfully true.

Mr. Gaiman promises that Anansi Boys is the kind of book that will make you smile. He says it’s the first “funny” book he’s written since he teamed up with Terry Pratchett in 1990 to publish Good Omens.

And, yes, there’s plenty of humor in the new novel but also a few scary bits to keep the reader on edge. Running through his tale are African fables about the mythical Anansi, an animal trickster whose stories later appeared in some of Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus stories.

Mr. Gaiman had early success with his Sandman comics, which used as many pictures as words. But his latest work is not spare in writing – his ideas have never been.
–Steve Brown


Anansi Boys Review – Daily Oklahoman

From the October 16th The Daily Oklahoman

Neil Gaiman’s new novel follows up on the premise of his Hugo and Nebula Award-winning American Gods: What if ancient gods are around, living in the world today, interacting with people without revealing their identities?

Anansi Boys focuses on the sons of Anansi, the trickster god, who drops dead
singing karaoke one night in Florida.

“Fat Charlie” Nancy works for a scummy talent agent in London he doesn’t particularly like. Charlie is engaged to the charming Rosie, whose mother doesn’t like him.

Rosie insists on inviting Charlie’s father to their wedding. But Charlie hasn’t seen or talked to his father in years. Growing up, Charlie felt his father went out of his way to embarrass him, even saddling him with the name “Fat Charlie.” Even though Charlie was no longer fat, the name stuck.

When Charlie calls an acquaintance of his father’s, Charlie learns his father has recently died. Charlie returns to Florida for the funeral. The little old ladies there (who may have dark secrets) reveal to Charlie that his father was a god. Charlie doesn’t believe this, but when they reveal that Charlie has a brother — whom he can contact by talking to a spider — Charlie takes them up on it.

When his brother, Spider, shows up on his doorstep, Charlie’s world turns upside-down. Spider has inherited some of his father’s abilities and goes about bending reality to suit his needs, including having Charlie’s fiancee fall in love with Spider, whom she believes is Charlie.

When Charlie turns to magic to get his life in order, the results aren’t good for either of Anansi’s boys, who may have to learn how to get along after all.

Anansi Boys is slighter and funnier than American Gods and a faster read. Gaiman, who created and wrote the innovative graphic novel series Sandman, explores themes of story and culture, along with family and changing relationships, in a clever, quick-witted book.
– Matthew Price


Anansi Boys Review – California Aggie (University of California – Davis)

From the October 13th California Aggie:

Reading best-selling author Neil Gaiman’s Anansi Boys is like listening to a master storyteller spin a farfetched yarn. He possesses such convincing skill that even with his fantastical subject matter, the audience can’t help but think that what he says just might be possible.

Gaiman jazzes a familiar troubled-sibling-reunion scenario up by making the main characters the sons of Anansi, an African trickster god who has played so many pranks on people that he is almost as hated as he is loved.

Demigod brothers Fat Charlie, a relatively powerless character, and his more gifted sibling Spider end up on the run from supernatural foes. They are hunted by the outlandish antagonist that comes in the form of a bird-vomiting woman, while depending on their wits for survival in the face of adversity.

This bizarre premise alone makes the book worth reading. But, the tight plot that is miraculously as neat as a spider’s web, Gaiman’s witty unfolding of the story and likable main characters are big draws too. Gaiman’s treatment of dysfunctional family relationships is tender and sincere, giving the book an emotional core that grounds the zaniness.

The only thing that would make Anansi Boys better is more gods. Only Anansi gets any thorough treatment in the book, while other gods play thankless villain roles.

In his earlier American Gods, Gaiman gave us deities from several pantheons, letting us peer into their lives to the point where we felt part of them. In Anansi Boys, we get only cursory glances of the intriguing beings introduced.

Gaiman, however, cannot pack everything into one book and Anansi Boys is an impressive work for something that could have been half-baked fluff.

Here’s hoping Gaiman will continue to bring the gods into our lives.
–Carmen Lau


Anansi Boys Review – TODAY (Singapore)

From the October 13th TODAY:

Do parents exist solely to embarrass their children?

Fat Charlie Nancy thinks so, especially when his father dies, in what Fat Charlie feels is the most embarrassing manner possible, just months before Fat Charlie’s wedding. So Fat Charlie flies all the way to Florida to arrange his father’s funeral, and learns, to his surprise, that he has a brother called Spider.

And that old Mr Nancy was, in fact, a god named Anansi.

Therein begins Fat Charlie’s journey to find out more about his heritage and family.

When Spider makes a mess of his brother’s life, Fat Charlie is forced to take extreme measures to get his life back in order.

Neil Gaiman’s new novel, Anansi Boys, is about a lot of things.

It’s about Anansi the Trickster, the Spider from the folk tales. It is about gods, and the belief – or lack of – in a world beyond ours. At heart, it is about familial relationships, as Fat Charlie and Spider come to terms with their unusual lineage and learn to make peace with each other.

Gaiman fans will be familiar with Mr Nancy from American Gods, and will not be disappointed with his appearance here.

Despite lacking the intensity of American Gods, Anansi Boys more than compensates for its light-hearted, quirky style. It is a book that can make people laugh and feel warm and fuzzy.

And it is credit to Gaiman’s penmanship that he has managed to imbue the novel with a certain quality that even people who can’t carry off green fedoras with style will appreciate.
–Tan Jun-Lei


Anansi Boys Review – Wilkes Barre Times Leader (Pennsylvania)

From the October 12th The Wilkes-Barre Times Leader:

Meet Fat Charlie Nancy.

Fat Charlie has a tedious job, a nice fiancee, a rather-less-then-nice mother-in-law-to-be and a father who he would swear was nothing but an embarrassment.

But that was yesterday- before dear ‘ol dad keeled over. Died. Fell off the stage in the middle of his last karaoke.

Now an old friend of the family insists Fat Charlie has a brother he doesn’t remember, and with Spider (Fat Charlie’s mysterious brother) in town and back in Fat Charlie’s life for the first time (and having more fun than Charlie ever did), suddenly nothing is what it seemed before.

With no transition at all, Spider is dating Fat Charlie’s fiancee, Fat Charlie is under suspicion of embezzling from his job, and his lazy, mischievous father turns out to have been the legendary Anansi – the old African god known for his powers of storytelling and quick wits.

A god even the other gods mistrusted and “had issues” with.

In this enjoyable text, readers see Fat Charlie take matters into his own hands and fight to take his life back from Spider (who seems to have some interesting powers of his own), and back from Anansi’s enemies and anyone and everyone (mortal or not) who stands in his way.

(But now, knowing who he is, and who his father was – does he really want his old life back?)

Growing up and coming to terms with one’s family has never been so entertaining.

Neil Gaiman has spent his whole career as a writer writing stories about stories. His genre-breaking, award-winning comic book series for DC Comics, Sandman, plus his novels Neverwhere, Coraline and American Gods all bring a delightfully literate yet accessible twist to storytelling in the printed form.

American Gods was one of last year’s New York Times fiction bestsellers and, like Anansi Boys, dealt with old gods in the modern world and what happens when the beliefs that nourish a god begin to disappear.

Anansi Boys (now number one on the NYT Bestselling Fiction list) makes an incredible read and is smile-provoking and thought-provoking. This is one book you will be offering to loan to friends, even if it’s just to have someone to discus it with afterwards. And if you are unlucky like me, you’ll end up hounding them to get it back.
–Scott Werbin

Oct 22
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Mirrormask Review – Harvard Independent

From the October 20th Harvard Independent:

The beauty and appeal of fantasy is that it doesn’t have to make sense. The things you see in a fantasy world do not have to have exact allegorical or symbolic equivalents in the “real” world. Sometimes, fantasy worlds just run away from their creators, taking on their own bizarre and idiosyncratic personalities. The joy of being a reader or viewer of the genre lies in getting caught up in these flights of pure fancy.

I suspect that this is why many people despise fantasy. “But it isn’t real! Why should I watch this, when it’s all fake? It doesn’t relate to my life.” Some just shrug off fantasy as silly and irrelevant.

If you see yourself in the above crowd, I can tell you now, you probably won’t like Mirrormask. Unapologetically fantastical, the movie has the organic feel of a garden run completely wild. Its creators, Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, plotted out the beds, laid the stones for the paths, planted and fertilized the seedlings, and then let it all grow as it would.

Mirrormask could be classified as a children’s movie, with a young lead and themes that will appeal to kids. But it’s not the sort of mindless drivel that often masquerades as children’s cinema. The visual splendor and timelessness of the story will enthrall people of all ages, and no one will confuse the heroine Helena with Lizzie Maguire. Mirrormask successfully combines a child’s fascination with adventure and the unreal and an adult’s fascinations with children growing up.

The movie’s plot is as basic and familiar as they come: a fifteen-year-old girl wants to carve out her own life, separate from her parents’. Just one twist: her parents own a circus, and she’s a performer. All Helena wants is a “normal life,” she tells her mother, right before adding that she wishes her mother were dead. But be careful what you wish for – her mother, Joanne, collapses in the middle of a show the very same evening. Suddenly, Joanne is sick, and the girl is convinced it’s her fault. The night of Joanne’s surgery, Helena goes to sleep and wakes up in Gaiman and McKean’s surreal version of Wonderland.

Shortly after wandering out of what isn’t exactly her apartment complex, she meets the masked Valentine (Jason Barry). The two nearly get swallowed up by a carbon blackness thatis apparently sweeping through the entire world. Predictably, the fantasy realm faces extinction, and our young protagonist quickly volunteers to save it. The Queen of Light has fallen into a coma, and Helena has to find the Mirrormask to wake her and restore balance to this world.

Anyone who has ever so much as looked at the back of a book in the sci-fi/fantasy section of Barnes & Noble could foresee this plot. It’s Joseph Campbell’s classic hero-myth formula. Where this movie shines is not in the originality of the basic storyline but in its execution.

Helena soon discovers that this strange universe is actually the world of her own drawings, a multitude of which cover an entire wall of her bedroom. For the adults watching this film, the story becomes a parable of creativity. Helena brings this world into being with her pen and her mind, and then enters into it to work out her issues with herself and her mother. Through her art, she is able to externalize her internal conflict and see it more clearly.

The young actress playing Helena, Stephanie Leonidas, has appeared in several popular television shows in the UK. Leonidas rescues a role that could easily have been irritating to the extreme and makes Helena sympathetic, even at her most frustrating. She avoids the obnoxious precociousness typical of leads in children’s movies, displaying a believable adolescent combination of childishness and maturity.

Director McKean’s credits include a few TV projects and the covers for Gaiman’s Sandman comics. Personally, I wondered how his mind-bending art would translate to the movie screen. I tend think of animation as either entirely computer-generated or entirely hand-drawn, but Mirrormask combines live-action and CG while also layering in elements of Helena’s static drawings. These techniques produce a wonderfully real-looking otherworld. What you see on screen is a fantasy universe that you can believe in.

McKean’s gleeful use of the technology makes the movie work. When he litters the background with flying books, schools of fish drifting by in mid-air, bird-beaked gorillas, and rainbow-winged, human-faced cats, the sheer uselessness of it all gives the world a depth all its own. There’s a sense that there are elements of the fantasy that you’re missing just out of the corner of your eye. McKean never drops the illusion of reality – he refuses to acknowledge that this world is fake or contrived. It may exist only in Helena’s mind and in her art, but that doesn’t make it any less beautiful, or any less true.
–Kelly Faircloth


Mirrormask Review – Minneapolis Star Tribune

From the October 13th Star Tribune:

Children’s films should be like children: cheeky, beautiful, overflowing with unbridled imagination and a belief in endless possibilities.

The films marketed to kids rarely turn out that way, of course, being generally put together by timid, under-stimulated adults who make the characters speak in the stilted rhythms of sitcoms and are decades out of touch with the fairytale logic of youth. MirrorMask, a gorgeous flight of the imagination, gets the recipe blissfully right. Drifting through a visually astounding dreamscape, it’s an Alice in Wonderland for the 21st century.

Adolescent Helena Campbell (Stephanie Leonidas, Yes) is fed up with a constant diet of fantasy. She wants to quit juggling, leave her parents’ traveling circus and join the world of normal people. Helena is actually struggling with herself: While she rejects performing for her mom and dad, she is in fact extravagantly gifted with imagination, covering her bedroom walls with fantastic characters and landscapes, and putting on sock-puppet plays in which her feet battle for supremacy.

When her mother is hospitalized in a coma after another argument with Helena about leaving the carnival, the distraught girl falls into a fitful sleep and awakens to find herself in a parallel world that is a distorted reflection of her own existence.

The new dimension is more colorful than daily life, rendered in spicy orange, sensual gold and passionate red, but it also has deeper shadows and stranger inhabitants. There are sphinxes and a gryphon, bird-gorillas, singing robots and mechanical spy-spiders that shadow Helena as she seeks a talisman that will revive her mother and the Queen of Light, a dreamworld doppelgänger who has also fallen into a deep slumber.

To add urgency to her quest, Helena discovers that a mean-spirited version of herself has replaced her in the everyday world and is destroying the portal connecting the two dimensions to strand Real Helena in fantasyland. As she goes, Helena learns that it’s vital to be able to believe in absurd, impossible things, such as hope.

Writer Neil Gaiman and illustrator-turned-director Dave McKean, longtime collaborators in publishing, have created a remarkable film, a cornucopia of digital effects that never feel forced or unnecessary. McKean composes his frames with impressionistic grace, while Gaiman provides a framework loose enough to encompass our own imaginative contributions to the story.

While it’s occasionally obscure and unsteadily paced, the film feels right on an emotional level. At times Helena appears to be dreaming lucidly, and at other moments she appears to be wafted away on a wave of endorphins. It’s a near-flawless marriage of content and form, a movie that kids, adults and graduate students of computer imagery will all have their own reasons to love.
–Colin Covert


Mirrormask Review – St. Paul Pioneer Press

From the October 14st St. Paul Pioneer Press:

Things get curious, curiouser and curiousest in MirrorMask, a modern-day fantasy that owes a storytelling debt to Alice in Wonderland and a visual debt to Salvador Dali’s The Persistence of Memory.

Based on Neil Gaiman’s fable, MirrorMask’s Alice is an exceedingly clever young woman named Helena. A teenager who is miffed at her parents, she’s fretting over her critically ill mother when she slips into a dreamland and has to solve a series of surreal puzzles that all have something to do with learning to make smart choices and helping her mother get better. “I hate feeling so helpless,” says Helena, a feeling most of us can relate to, but the movie is the story of how Helena learns when she must accept helplessness and when she has to fight it.

Stephanie Leonidas, as Helena, and Gina McKee, as her mother, make sure the movie’s emotions are grounded in the real world, but MirrorMask’s inventive dreamworld is equally involving, with giant puppets that resemble Minneapolis’ In the Heart of the Beast Puppet and Mask Theatre, a massive library where winged books flap right off the shelves like birds and a loopy dog/man who likes riddles.

Emotionally direct and visually baroque, MirrorMask reminded me of Queen’s epic songs, which find over-the-top ways to explore everyday situations. Helena’s methods aren’t that different from Queen’s. If you pay attention, for instance, you’ll notice that the dreamworld Helena enters looks a lot like the drawings she doodles while she’s bored with her life. And that the trip those doodles take her on seems designed to teach her that anything she can imagine can come true.


Mirrormask Review – Philadelphia Inquirer

From the October 21st Philadelphia Inquirer:

Not everyone’s cup of tea, but a strong, heady brew, Mirrormask is a trippy fantasy about a teenage circus performer on an Ozlike quest to save a sleeping queen who, in fact, resembles no one so much as the girl’s sickly mother.

The work of novelist, comics scribe and cult god Neil Gaiman and artist Dave McKean (they cowrote; McKean directs), this English-made oddity is a dazzling, surrealist concoction full of talking sphinxes and flying books, bizarro penguins, ooky one-eyed spiders, beautiful ink drawings that spring to life, and creatures of all stripes and sizes that look as if they were sculpted by Dalí, or Bosch, or a kid with a really warped imagination.

Which is what Helena (Stephanie Leonidas, looking like a young, punky Helena Bonham Carter) is. A juggler, an artist, and a reluctant member of her parents’ circus troupe, Helena tumbles into a deep, dark dream after having a fight with her mum (Gina McKee) and then hearing that Mum’s in the hospital, awaiting surgery.

Various characters from her waking life (like Dad, played by Rob Brydon) show up in Helena’s slumberville, sporting masks and fancy costumes, intermingling with computer-generated creations on a whooshy, collage-like screenscape.

Mirrormask, which was produced under the auspices of the Jim Henson Co., is too long, and too rich, for its own good, but clearly Gaiman and McKean were bursting with ideas. Those ideas fly all over the place, sometimes landing with a thunk, but more often taking the breath away.
–Steven Rea


Mirrormask Review – Orlando Sentinel

From the October 21st Orlando Sentinel:

Mirrormask is an ornately gorgeous jewel box, a clockwork dreamscape of an imaginative girl’s coming-of-age nightmare.

But it’s also a 30-minute idea wrapped in a 100-minute movie. It’s a jewel box filled with cubic zirconia.

Writer-director Dave McKean’s fantasy, produced with the help of the Jim Henson special-effects people, is designed to within an inch of its life. He even designed his lovely, 21-year-old star, Stephanie Leonidas, to look like the punk-period (late 1980s) Helena Bonham Carter of Getting It Right.

Leonidas’ character’s name? Helena.

Helena is a circus teen. Her family runs one, a menagerie of jugglers, clowns, mimes and a high-wire artist, her mom, played by Gina McKee of Notting Hill. Helena is a talented juggler with a serious artistic bent. And she has had it with living her dad’s dream.

Let other kids run away to join the circus, she says. “I want to run away and join real life!”

Mom passes out after a heated argument and a performance. Dad (Rob Brydon) is trying to save the circus, and Helena is wracked by guilt. That guilt, and the drawings of her fevered imagination, spill over into a long night’s dream.

It’s a shadowy, monochromatic world of competing towns, a city of light and a city of shadows. Mom is recast as the white queen and the black one. Ms. White has fallen into a deep sleep. Helena goes on a quest for the talisman or charm that will revive her, a mirrormask.

“We wake the queen and save the world,” she says to her masked sometime-sidekick, Valentine.

It is a dream of digital griffins, sphinxes and hairy, face-sucking spiders, most of whom are rendered in a murk so dark you can’t make out all their digital details.

She fetches The Really Useful Book, full of advice to “Remember what your mother told you” and “Say you’re sorry” and the like.

And she does, and never ever does that sexy-cool wisp of her hair flopped over one eye slip out of place.

The dream trip is an hour long, and only fitfully amusing amid the flood of images.

At least Leonidas is a riveting screen presence. Plainly if they ever film The Helena Bonham Carter Story, she is their girl.
–Roger Moore

Oct 21
icon1 lucy_anne | icon2 Misc | icon4 11:46 pm| icon3No Comments »

Coraline Film News

From the October 21st Hollywood Reporter:

Dakota Fanning has signed on to voice the title character in Laika Entertainment’s animated feature Coraline.

Henry Selick (Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas, James and the Giant Peach) is writing and directing the film, based on the best-selling novel by Neil Gaiman.

The story centers on a young girl (Fanning) who discovers an alternate version of her life after walking through a secret door in her new home. On the surface, this parallel reality is similar to her real life, only much better. The adventure turns dangerous, however, when the girl’s counterfeit parents try to keep her forever.

“It’s sweet kismet,” Selick said. “Dakota is a verygifted actor who will bring great skill and emotionaldepth to the character. It will be an honor to workwith her.”

Coraline is in preproduction at Laika, a Portland, Ore.-based animation studio owned by Philip H. Knight

Selick, who joined Laika as supervising director in May 2004, segued to Coraline after wrapping Laika’s first CG film, the short Moongirl, which reimagines lunar mythology.

Eleven-year-old Fanning, who began her acting career at age 6, has become one of the most in-demand actresses of any age. Her credits include War of the Worlds, Man on Fire and I Am Sam. She stars opposite Kurt Russell in DreamWorks’ horse-themed Dreamer: Inspired by a True Story, which opens today. Fanning also toplines the upcoming Charlotte’s Web.

Laika, which absorbed Vinton Studios in July, produced Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride and is in preproduction on the CG feature Jack & Ben’s Animated Adventure.
–Tatiana Siegel


Feature – Vancouver Province

From the October 9th Vancouver Province:

Neil Gaiman may be the busiest writer alive.

Currently on tour for his latest novel, Anansi Boys, Gaiman is also involved in two upcoming films — the adaptation of his children’s book MirrorMask and a new version of the classic Beowulf, which will feature Hollywood A-stars Anthony Hopkins and Angelina Jolie.

In Vancouver for the upcoming writers’ festival, he took time out of his busy schedule to talk to The Province about his various projects.

You’re currently on tour to support your new novel, Anansi Boys, but you also have a new film, Mirrormask. How’s it doing?

I think it’s doing OK. It opened on 12 screens and it made $7,000 a screen, which is fairly good — considering the promotional budget has consisted of leaving it to me to get to the word out on my blog.

You have a reputation for having the most books optioned for film without actually being made into films. Is that starting to change?

Not really. I’ve written the script for Beowulf, and Mirrormask was an original project, but I still haven’t got anything else I’ve done coming out. On the other hand, if everything that could come out does, there will be five or six movies in 2007 and everyone will be completely sick of me.

Has Anansi Boys been optioned?

The studios said they liked the idea but they didn’t understand the fantasy. I had several studios say they would absolutely be interested if I would remove all the fantasy elements from the film, to which I said, I am rich, old and cranky, so f— off.

The book came out and went to the top of the New York Times bestseller list, and now producers are picking it up and saying it’s great, and the phone has started ringing.

It’s weird. In a world in which Harry Potter films and Star Wars are the bestselling things out there, you will still get executives saying people don’t like fantasy.

Most of the writers I know seem to hate touring. But you seem to be always on tour — and you even seem to enjoy it.

If you’re a writer, it’s a lonely kind of thing you do in a room and then you get a royalty cheque. The cheque tells you you’ve sold half a million copies of something. But that’s just a number. Coming out and realizing those are real people — that you’ve made a difference to their lives, or at least entertained them, that’s a good thing for a writer and a humbling thing for a writer.

There are moments on this tour that have been surreal. For example, I’ve had several pediatric doctors at children’s hospitals tell me how important the character of Death in the Sandman comics has been to help them get through the death of children on a daily basis — you know the line of Death’s, “You get what everybody else gets, you get a lifetime.”

There was a guy in Denver whose son died young – he was only seven or eight years old. And this man realized he’d never told his son a bedtime story before he died. So after the showing of the body this man was alone with his son and he read him the whole of Coraline, which took about three hours. So moments like that definitely remind you that what you’re doing has value and purpose. Yes, you’re making up stories, but those stories are touching people’s lives.

You also stay in touch with readers through your blog (http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal). What are your plans for its future?

The day the blog stops being fun…I may take a holiday, I may stop it. I must have written more than a million words on the blog by now, which is kind of scary.

But you have more than a million readers of the blog.

One-point-two million readers per month the last time we checked, which was a while ago now.

We’re starting to see things such as e-paper on the horizon, to say nothing of the trend toward podcasting audio books. Where do you see the book in 10 years?

I think books are sharks. The shark is hundreds of millions of years old. There were sharks contemporary with and before dinosaurs. And sharks are still around now because there is nothing in the ocean that is better at being a shark than a shark. And it’s the same with books.

I think a paperback book is a perfectly evolved entity. You can drop it and it won’t break. You can drop it in the bath and still read it.It’s solar operated. You can find your place in it immediately. It’s the right size and weight.

What’s next for you?

Well, not a lot of recovery time. A week or so on the set of Beowulf, because I want to see that being shot. Then off to England for another tour of Anansi Boys.And when that’s done I come home and I have these cool plans right now that involve sleeping a lot.
–Peter Darbyshire


Feature – Minneapolis Star Tribune

From the October 14th Star Tribune:

Twin Cities fantasy star Neil Gaiman is having quite a week. His new novel, Anansi Boys, debuted at No. 1 on the New York Times and Publisher’s Weekly best-seller lists and Mirrormask, the dreamlike film he made with his longtime illustrator Dave McKean, has already earned back a substantial portion of its tiny budget in limited release. It opens in the Twin Cities area today.

Q You’ve just concluded a North American book-signing tour. How’s your hand?

A It hurts. Everything hurts. I’ve signed books for 7,000 people. It feels like a marathon boxing match where the last round happened, they declared a draw, and there’s a rematch in England (and Scotland and Ireland) in two weeks’ time.

Q Time magazine just declared you one of the two most interesting people creating pop culture right now, along with “Serenity’s” Joss Whedon. How do you feel about that?

A I’m not taking any of it seriously. I feel a lot like sushi right now. It had been an underground thing and now it’s not become McDonald’s and it’s never going to become McDonald’s, but the culture isn’t scared of it any more. I will never be Applebee’s but there are enough people out there that like what I do that I get called one of the two most interesting people making pop culture. I don’t believe it’s true for a moment but I’m hugely flattered.

Q You’ve been producing fantasy stories for 20 years now. Does it get harder to spin out new stories and keep surprising yourself?

A I would be much richer but infinitely more miserable if I figured out how to keep doing the same kind of thing time after time. What I try to do is something utterly different from the last thing.

Q Is your move into film part of a plan to stay creatively engaged?

A Given the choice of something I know how to do and something I have no clue how to do, I will choose to try the new thing and make my mistakes every time. In films, I love the fact that I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s a whole new world. I get to go from something like Mirrormask, which is a tiny experimental movie made for no money at all [the budget was $4 million] to this giant production of Beowulf being done by Bob Zemeckis for hundreds of millions of dollars.

There are strange, hellish moments in Hollywood that make root canal surgery look inviting. You will find yourself sitting around a table with a bunch of people, none of whom have ever written a script, never made a movie or told a story, while they tell you what’s wrong with your story and suggest that maybe everything could be fixed if only you could put in some baseball because people like baseball. But the deal from [Henson Co., the movie's producers] was that we’ll give you not enough money to make a film, and you get to write the script and we’ll let Dave make his movie with one palace that looks like a human body and pulses and another that looks like it was built out of dragonfly wings. And now, rather than coming out on DVD as was planned, it’s appearing on real screens for paying audiences.

Q Are you still pleased with your decision to relocate from London to the Minneapolis area?

A Yes. It was hard in ‘98. I’d been out here for about seven years at that point and had the seven-year itch. I really wanted to go home. Then the Internet happened, and the things that I missed were now becoming available. My favorite newspaper? It was there for me in real time. I could listen to English radio. The world became suddenly a lot less local and it didn’t matter where I was quite as much. Bear in mind, you’re talking to me at my favorite time of the year in this part of the world. This wonderful fall where the skies are unimaginably blue and the sun is out and it’s hot except there are little crisp breezes and the smell of leaf mold on the air and the nights get chilly and walking somewhere is pleasurable because there’s exactly the right heat-to-cool ratio.

It’s a little bit magic.
–Colin Covert


Mirrormask Features – Zap2It

From multiple sources, but originally printed in Zap2it:

For writers who dream of medical thrillers, police procedurals, teen sex romps or historical biopics, Hollywood is always prepared to make those scribblings into reality. Things are more complicated for people who dream like Neil Gaiman.

“Two years ago there was a front page article in the Hollywood Reporter, which was on me and I didn’t know they were doing it and it was kind of embarrassing, because the theme of it was ‘this is the person who has sold the most stuff that hasn’t yet been made to Hollywood,’” Gaiman recalls, showing more pride than actual embarrassment. “It was pointed out that pretty much everything I’ve ever done has been bought and then not made.”

This Friday (Sept. 30), a feature-length Gaiman script — the twisted children’s story MirrorMask — will hit theatres. A collaboration with artist Dave McKean, MirrorMask is vintage Gaiman, a fairly tale crammed full of fantastical creatures, imaginary realms and mythological resonances. The film is a mixture of live action and digital animation and for Gaiman’s fans, it offers hope that after so many years of optioning his work and then letting it gather cobwebs, Hollywood may finally have caught up with the writer.

“What’s interesting now is that MirrorMask is coming out and in two weeks time, Bob Zemeckis starts filming Beowulf,” Gaiman says, going through the list in his mind. “A few weeks ago, I read online that they’ve officially greenlighted Coraline, which I assume means that Harry Selick has either started shooting it or … I know he’s been sending me bits of art and songs by They Might Be Giants that they’re writing for it — so that’s happening.”

Beowulf is a perfect example of the arc of technology advancing to the level of human creativity. Gaiman and Roger Avary first wrote their take on the Old English epic poem back in 1998, but they wrote a script that even Gaiman admits was “fundamentally probably unmakeable.” Then, though, Robert Zemeckis decided that he could use the same motion capture technology he pioneered on The Polar Express and push it one step further. Now, rather than having to cast different actors as the 18-year-old Beowulf depicted in the script’s first two acts and the 70-year-old Beowulf of the climax, Ray Winstone will deliver a single performance and computers will do the rest.

“Whether it will or will not work, I don’t know,” Gaiman admits. “I hope very much that it will. But suddenly I can actually imagine a world in which a fight between Old Beowulf and the dragon at the end really works.”

In addition to Coraline, another warped children’s fantasy featuring alternative worlds, and Beowulf, the possibilities of digital filmmaking will allow McKean and Gaiman to collaborate again on an adaptation of Signal to Noise. Gaiman also hopes to make his feature directing debut on an adaptation of Death: The High Cost of Living. That long-gestating project, now titled Death and Me, may find a home at New Line.

“I directed a short film a couple of years ago called A Short Film About John Bolton and may do a few more, but I’m not really a director,” says Gaiman. “I’m just somebody who feels that there are certain of my things I don’t want somebody else screwing up. If anyone’s going to screw it up, it may as well be me.”
–Daniel Fienberg


Also from Zap2it:

Neil Gaiman remembers the things that entertained him as a child.

“I love the fact that I remember to this day Warner Bros. cartoons, the power of small, hungry vicious creators after other hungry, vicious creatures and the expression on Wiley E. Coyote’s face as he would head out across a road that wasn’t there anymore, before collapsing a few thousand feet, preferably with a rock on top of him,” he laughs.

“I don’t remember, though I must have seen them, the equivalent of those PBS-y cartoons in which lots of people who love each other have a little misunderstanding, but then they have a big hug, having learned a lesson. I know which I carry with me. I know which I remember. And I know which are important. And it’s not the big hug. It’s never the big hug. It’s always the cool stuff.”

MirrorMask, a collaboration between Gaiman and illustrator Dave McKean, probably includes one or two big hugs, but it’s mostly about the cool stuff, a young woman’s quest through computer generated world. It’s a twisted tale likely to scare as much as it entertains, which is probably why MirrorMask is being released as an experimental arthouse movie, rather than as a children’s fairy tale.

“It is an odd thing,” McKean reflects. “People grow up and then they just become very, very overprotective. I’ve got two kids and I’ve just never been so bothered. They receive things on their own terms. Even material that’s aimed quite a bit over their heads, they receive something from it. They take a context from it. And then as they get older, they realize more context for it and grows and it becomes deeper.”

While Gaiman may be best known for older skewing work like American Gods and the Sandman series, Gaiman, a father of three, has worked with McKean, a father of two, on a number of projects for children, books that don’t shy away from darkness.

“I think there is this idea that kids need to be protected from things and it’s not one that I’ve ever particularly endorsed as a children’s fiction writer,” Gaiman says. “I get told off about that, when I do want to do children stuff, because I always figure that unless you have scary things that are scary, then winning a battle against them is meaningless.”

Both filmmakers revel in the assistance of the Jim Henson Company, which produced MirrorMask as well as The Dark Crystal and Labyrinth, both acknowledged influences.

“It seemed like a strange mix, actually, for Neil and I to throw our lot in with the Henson Company,” McKean says. “It felt odd, but actually I think it’s perfect. I think there is something about Jim’s work that is direct — It’s bright and sharp and it never talks down to its audience. And there’s just a delight in imagination and communication in Jim’s stuff.”

Ultimately, Gaiman has come to terms with the limited release because he knows that for films like MirrorMask, the true measure of value doesn’t come from the box office figures for its opening weekend.

“There are things like that,” he acknowledges. “The Dukes of Hazzard movie, it’s had its moment in the sun. It has come. It has gone. It will sell some copies on DVD. It will go away again. It may show up on late-night television, but it probably won’t. That was it for the Dukes of Hazzard movie.”

Gaiman continues, “The nice thing about MirrorMask is that it was never made for the Friday night grosses. It’s going to get a small release. It’s quite possible that if that small release works, it will grow a little before it goes away… But I can more or less guarantee that in 15 years, it’ll still be being watched.”

MirrorMask opens in limited release on Friday, Sept. 30.
–Daniel Fienberg

Oct 11
Clippings
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This piece accompanied the debut of Anansi Boys onto the New York Times bestseller charts this Sunday:

In the 1990’s the British novelist Neil Gaiman was among the best comic book writers alive. (Norman Mailer said of his Sandman series, “Along with all else, ‘Sandman’ is a comic strip for intellectuals, and I can say it’s about time.”) Gaiman branched out into children’s books — his Wolves in the Walls, illustrated by Dave McKean, is one of the best scary kids’ stories I know — and published a handful of novels. But he always felt like an undergroung enthusiasm. Until now. Gaiman’s new novel, Anansi Boys enters the hardcover fiction list this week at No. 1. Gaiman, who lives near Minneapolis, is poised to make plenty more cultural noise. For years he’s been thought of, as The Hollywood Reporter put it, as “the most-optioned author in Hollywood who has yet to have any of his work translated to the big screen.” But now Mirrormask, for which he wrote the script, has opened; he’s completed, with Roger Avary, a script for Robert Zemeckis’s forthcoming Beowulf; and his children’s novel Coraline is being made into a film.

He plans to stick with fiction, though. As he told The Hollywood Reporter: “Comics and books have always had the amazing advantage of having an unlimited special effects budget.”
–Dwight Garner

Anansi Boys was also reviewed in this Sunday’s New York Times; the same review is carried in the Calgary Herald

Regarding the Salon piece with Neil and Susanna Clarke, it looks like Making Light has nailed it. Providing a public service, as they often do, they have thoughtfully supplied actual photos so one can make comparisons with the sketches.

A note: the Mirrormask list of theaters available on the Sony site may not be complete: for example, while it is only listing that the film is at the Landmark Sunshine Cinemas in New York City, it is also playing at the Cinema Arts Centre in Huntington, NY. So keep any eye on your local papers’ capsule reviews and schedules; you may be pleasantly surprised to find that it has opened in a small movie house closer to home.

And Reg informs me that there is a CD recording available of interviews and panel highlights by Neil, Poppy Z. Brite, Robin Hobb, and the rest of the guests who attended the Continuum 3 convention in Melbourne, Australia this year. Just fill out the following order form and send your check or money order to:

Spectrum FM Radio
PO Box 642
Belgrave VIC 3160
AUSTRALIA

No mention is made regarding shipping and handling outside Australia, although there should be fees above and beyond the $25.00AU listed.

Alternatively, you can just pick up the CD of the Great Debate: Humans are Unnatural Creatures panel, which you all want – you just don’t realize it yet.

And as this is nominally a family forum, it’s probably not appropriate to mention the part of the body they discuss bleaching in order to prove the they are unnatural case. But the story is infamous by now.

No really. Not suitable for prime time, but very funny indeed.

More details about the CDs are available at
http://www.continuum.org.au/c4_offers_cds.htm

Oct 11

From the October 9th San Francisco Chronicle:

With Anansi Boys, Neil Gaiman, author of Coraline and the acclaimed Sandman comics, gives his flair for comedy free rein without losing his appreciation for the darker aspects of world mythology.

When mild-mannered London accountant Fat Charlie Nancy learns his long-estranged father has died while performing in a karaoke bar, he is mostly embarrassed, as he has been during the bulk of his life. During his visit to Florida for the funeral, Charlie learns that he has a brother he’s never met — nor even heard of. When this mysterious sibling, named Spider, later turns up on his doorstep, Charlie is in no way prepared for the seismic shock about to upset his well-ordered life.

Anansi Boys is tangentially connected to Gaiman’s previous novel for adults, the multiple-award winner American Gods, but its tone is much lighter, verging on the daft. Like Coyote, Loki or even Brer Rabbit, Anansi the Spider is one of the great trickster gods. During his misadventures, Fat Charlie discovers the truth about himself and learns to maneuver the web that binds life, love and family.

Even when juggling a homicidal talent agent, the ghost of one of his victims and flocks of aggressive flamingoes, Gaiman deftly keeps the story aloft. Anansi Boys is a welcome pick-me-up for any reader tired of nothing but a seemingly constant stream of bad news.
– Michael Berry

Oct 11

From the current Green Man Review:

Mirrormask, Dave McKean and Neil Gaiman’s joint venture with Jim Henson Productions, is an offbeat, charming film that fans of all three will likely adore. The film revolves around Helena, a girl on the cusp of adolescence who’s living what would be a dream come true for many kids: she works for a circus. However, Helena longs to live a “normal” life,I nevitably leading to conflict with her parents, who are the proprietors of this quirky, homespun circus.

Life takes a sudden downward turn for Helena when, in the wake of a heated argument between the two, her mother falls ill, curtailing the circus’ tour and fostering one heck of a self-imposed guilt trip for the girl. And then, on the night of her mother’s surgery, things take a turn for the decidedly strange when Helena seemingly awakens from sleep to find herself in another world, alone, and drawn into a conflict not of her own conscious making.

It’s that this point that Mirrormask takes off and begins to truly shine. This new world, the Dark Lands, is drawn, quite literally, from Helena’s fertile imagination, and thus from that of Dave McKean. Using a variety of media, McKean has rendered the Dark Lands in exquisite detail, and, with help from the folks at Henson, populated it with a bizarre mix of mask-wearing humans and fantastical critters (the winged, human-faced cats with a taste for books are delightfully creepy). Imagine McKean’s Sandman covers come to life and you’ll have some vague sense of the sheer otherness of Mirrormask’s dream world.

By comparison to the richness of the film’s visuals, the actual narrative structure is far more simple and straightforward: Helena is on a hero’s quest to mend wrongs and set the world aright. It’s a plot very familiar in form to fantasy fans, if turned on its head a bit by being rendered within a dream with visuals such as Mirrormask’s. In a nutshell: the balance between the worlds of light and dark has been disrupted by someone eager to escape both lands, and the queen of light lays in a deathlike sleep while darkness overtakes her lands. She must be awakened, or both worlds will be destroyed.

Helena and a newfound companion, fellow juggler Valentine, race through the land to find the charm necessary to reverse the sleep — the titular Mirrormask — before they can be found by the queen of dark or the perpetrator can cut off Helena’s return to the real world. If there’s occasionally a certain lack of cohesiveness to the plot (why does Valentine leave Helena’s side when they’ve nearly succeeded? Is the dream Helena’s . . . or her mother’s, as the latter asserts within the dream?), it plays well enough into the film’s overall dreamlike quality. Dreams are rarely straightforward, why should this one be any different?

Viewers have seen this kind of heroic theme before, done on a variety of scales, but Gaiman’s wit and the unique setting prevent the plot from succumbing to mundanity. Though on occasion, the fantastical surroundings and creatures threaten to overwhelm, or at least diminish, the characters’ actions and emotions.

Stephanie Leonidas is luminous as Helena, a perfect combination of wide-eyed innocence and steely resolve just a hair’s breadth from adulthood. Her Helena is both likable and believable, whether she’s petulant or regretful. Gina McKee also gives a fine performance in her triple role as Helena’s mother and the two queens (both aspects of her own personality as seen through the lens of Helena’s eyes). The small supporting cast is also solid, if largely off screen (look for a quirky cameo by Stephen Fry).

Mirrormask turned out to be an intriguing experiment by two artists who enjoy a new challenge, one that mostly succeeds, though it will likely have limited appeal among general audiences more used to traditional animation or fantasy on a more epic scale, viewers who might not see the beauty of Helena’s very personal quest, or who might miss the story for the scenery.
–April Gutierrez

Oct 10
This weeks statistics
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Anansi Boys placings on the North American hardcover fiction bestseller lists:

  • Booksense, October 6th: 5

  • New York Times, October 9th: 1

  • Publishers Weeky, October 10th: 6

  • San Francisco Chronicle, October 9th: 1

  • Washington Post, October 9th: 5

    • Mirrormask Weekend Gross for October 7-9th: $93,539

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