by [name redacted]

For all the grumbling from the peanut gallery, Mirrormask is one of the better children’s movies to come around in the last couple of decades. Something that I can imagine annoying some is a certain deliberate lack of urgency to the tale. Fair enough, one might assume, since the opening scenes establish that all which follows is a dream. Logically enough, then, at some point the heroine will wake and everything will be more or less okay. What happens in between is important on on the basis of peril but in terms of character development — a bit of Lewis Carroll allegory crossed with your Peter Pan or Narnia-flavored psychological metaphor. The issue at stake is our heroine’s emotional state and whether and how she makes sense of the problems in her real life through the tools provided by her subconscious.

Another potential problem is the magpie-like way that Gaiman evokes snippets and tropes from his favorite fantasy and children’s stories then rearranges them to color his own work. In some of his work, like Coraline, the appropriation is overbearing and feels like a stand-in for actual development.

Here, though, the story treads carefully to avoid feeling like it’s simply borrowing pop-Gothic furniture. It’s knowing, though not smug. There’s a sincerity in the story’s execution, particularly in the way it’s shot, and in the acting.

If you’re not paying attention, you could accuse Stephanie Leonidas of seeming a bit wooden. Clearly most of the movie is shot against greenscreen, and you do get some of that glorious “where am I?” acting that comes with the territory. Yet otherwise she’s a bit of a revelation — quirky, sensitive, yet rational and well-adjusted. She’s written like a developing adult, and played like one. It’s rare that children are written as smart and individual characters to the extent that we see in Helena, making her a lovely role model for the intended audience.

Curiously, for all its clear artifice the movie rarely gets caught up in whimsy just for the sake of whimsy. Though it often seems in danger of vanishing in a puff of affectation, I don’t recall feeling like it got carried away. In the end I was impressed by the movie’s restraint. For all its glam sensibility, it has a head on its shoulders.

I won’t call this a great movie. It’s a very good one, though, especially for the genre. I like to think of it as empowered. It’s a film about learning empathy and responsibility, and distinguishing one’s own wants and needs from the expectations of others. And it manages to avoid being overbearing about any of that. It’s very light movie, all around. As I said, from the start it’s clear that there’s never any real danger. It’s just an hour and forty minutes of self-exploration and musing.

These are the sorts of topics that I think distinguish “young adult” fiction from children’s stories. Whereas the children’s fiction might just dwell in the fantasy and metaphor for its own sake, a growing mind feeds on this kind of film; on the exploration and gradual understanding of one’s own self, and through that the surrounding world. Often using very clumsy metaphor. Which is also true here.