YMMV / MirrorMask

• Cult Classic: Like Labyrinth before it. Funnily enough, this was actually predicted in Stephen Holden's review in The New York Times.
• Everyone is Jesus in Purgatory: For real, this time. The whole thing is extremely psychological.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Stephen Fry delivering a voiceover about creating an imaginative fantasy world.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "Why do birds / Suddenly appear?" with some intentional Uncanny Valley for good measure.
  • Note that the Uncanny Valley just topped it off, it wasn't by far the most disturbing part of the scene. The symbolism and literalism, especially with the Soundtrack Dissonance thrown in, was the most disturbing part of the scene.
  • "Hungry. Still hungry."
  • "And dear, don't let them see you're afraid."
  • The puppets in the below entry. There's just something about them that makes you wonder what's going on in their heads...
• Signature Scene: The wind-up statues singing "Close To You" and hypnotizing Helena into becoming a replacement Princess.
• Spiritual Successor:
  • The Henson Company asked Gaiman for a movie that's "whatever genre Labyrinth is."
  • In 2006 and 2009, The Dark Crystal, Labyrinth and MirrorMask were released together on DVD and Blu-Ray as "Jim Henson's Fantasy Film Collection", acknowledging them as a Spiritual Trilogy (Guillermo del Toro's films Cronos, The Devil's Backbone and Pan's Labyrinth got the same treatment in 2016).
  • Mirrormask was written by Neil Gaiman and directed by Dave McKean. Would you like to know what else was written by Gaiman, with illustrations by McKean, a few years earlier? Coraline, where Gaiman visits a few of these same themes — an alternate universe with an alternate, oppressively-affectionate mother figure who has strange black eyes. This makes Mirrormask a sort of spiritual successor to Coraline.
• Toy Ship: Helena and Valentine have a bit of Ship Tease going, particularly when he shows up in the real world at the end. But since it's implied she's early-to-mid teens (though played by a 21-year-old actress) and he's late-teens-to-early-twenties, they might want to wait a few years.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Many people compare this film with Labyrinth; being written by Neil Gaiman it's not surprising that most of the story is a complete Mind Screw that even the adults will find confusing... also, it is filled with some creepy moments.

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