“Movies are a form of escapism” said someone probably at some point. And when have we all wanted to escape our lives more than right now? Sometimes you’ll want to escape into something comforting and familiar. Sometimes you’ll need to escape into a world new to you. In this series, I shall guide you through the genres of film & tv escapism so we can all experience something, anything, else.
When I suggest an escape into a fantasy world, you may think of Middle Earth or… whatever Game of Thrones land is called.
My favorite fantasy movies are a double escape; I escape my reality into the reality of the film and then I follow a character as she escapes her own reality into a fantasy world. My personal favourite is MirrorMask. Written by Neil Gaiman (Coraline, Good Omens) and Dave McKean, directed by McKean and filled with his art, it’s a beautiful, weird world you’ve never escaped into before. I recently rewatched it and then ordered the “art of” book, The Alchemy of MirrorMask, to bask in its color palette and McKean’s drawings.
The structure of MirrorMask is familiar to anyone familiar with the books, and film adaptations of, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or The Wizard of Oz. And there are many adaptations to choose from. If you’re looking for one quite true to the book(s), try Alice in Wonderland (1999), starring Tina Marjorino in a yellow dress. It combines material from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There, so you get to meet even more interesting Wonderland/Looking Glass Land characters than you may already know. And for something dark and modern, try Malice in Wonderland. A young woman follows around “Whitey” as he is preparing for his temperamental crime boss’s birthday party. Set in Northern England, it’s darker but still comedic. My favorite Wizard of Oz adaptation is Return to Oz, from Disney’s creepy dark 80s era. It is fucking creepy and the Wheelers and the hallway of heads haunted my dreams as a child and watching it as an adult did not help; it’s still fucking creepy.
Nick Willing is responsible for three mini series based on classic books in which a young girl goes on an adventure in a fantasy land; Alice, Tin Man, and Neverland. I enjoy watching adaptations like these, knowing the source material, because it becomes fun to see where the writer has drawn from characters, places, and specific lines from the book and interpreted and changed them into this different world. Sometimes they stray a little too far from the original and lose their purpose, but sometimes that’s okay, to use some inspiration to create a new story.
There are plenty of original works, like MirrorMask, that use this fantasy world format, such as Sucker Punch and Spirited Away. Sucker Punch delivers multiple fantasy worlds, and a killer soundtrack, while Spirited Away, and many other Studio Ghibli films, brings you on a sometimes delightful, sometimes urgent, quest with a young heroine.
If you ever dreamed of being able to leave this world and your troubles behind to go on an adventure in a new world… you can follow the white rabbit into these movies.