Rating:
Genre:
Soundtrack
Release Date: 09/20/2005
Director
Dave McKean's
MirrorMask, a film developed through
the Jim Henson Company, is an elaborate fantasy that has been likened to a 21st century version of
The Wizard of Oz or
Alice in Wonderland in the sense that it follows a girl into a strange world, albeit a darker one than those depicted in such children's books.
McKean imagined an extremely diverse background score. ("I wanted the film to sound like everywhere and nowhere," he writes in the liner notes to the
soundtrack album.) And he has gotten it in the first such effort by
jazz saxophonist
Iain Ballamy, who, for his part, claims with justification to have created "a unique and eclectic
soundtrack." Eclectic it certainly is. One minute an accordion is playing
circus music (in keeping with the opening setting in a circus). Soon after, Eastern European music reminiscent of
Kurt Weill (and later
Tom Waits) appears, then a complex, fast-paced
classical composition that sounds like something
Frank Zappa would come up with (
"Rabbit Band"). There are eerie passages that sound orchestral (although much of the music is programmed rather than played), and here and there the Scandinavian singer
Josefine Cronholm turns up, notably in an odd-sounding, multi-tracked cover of the old
Carpenters hit
"Close to You." This is a long
soundtrack album, running more than 74 minutes and including 30 cues, and, without reference to the film, it sounds like a lot of different
soundtrack albums patched together. But maybe that's just a way of saying that the director got what he wanted.
~William Ruhlmann, All Music Guide
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