Mirrormask (2005)

In short: Don't bother. (Unless you're a Gaiman freak, in which case you'll see it regardless of what we say)

Kate: I'm leaving this one to Ross, who gets talkative when he's pissed off. Besides, he's the animation freak. Just know that I didn't think that it was quite as bad as he did. Not worth going to the theater, mind you--but maybe if you were bedridden and had watched every other movie in the house...

Ross: The most positive thing I can say is that I didn't absolutely hate the last third of it, and if one had to choose only one third of their movie to not be abominable, the last one is a good choice. Kate has speculated that the reason the last part is watchable (even kind of enjoyable) is that it's paced correctly, plain and simple. This could well be the case, I'm not sure. As a coming of age story (and many of you know that, in general, I dont' like these), I think it's not bad -- as a story, even if the movie is bad. I feel like this could have been a movie, but it definitely didn't turn out that way. And with that in mind, a collection of objections:

1. The animation isn't very good. It was done on the cheap, and it shows. It's not surprising; I heard that the budget was like $4 million, and that's just not enough to do a feature film that's mostly animated. Sorry.

2. I don't care about mirror land, at least not until the last third of the movie. The director spends a lot of time trying to "establish the world," which is something I hear bantered about a bit with regards to fantasy, sci-fi, etc. I think it's crap. "Defining the world" is analogous to telling, not showing, and is better done in fan fiction than in a movie.

3. "Look, we're on a quest!" I feel like a lot of the time in the movie is spent establishing that we're following one of those classical plots, and that somebody (my imaginary interlocutor) will object that there are really only six stories, so it's okay if the director slavishly followed one of them. And I will respond (to the imaginary interlocutor) that the job of a director (author, etc.) is to embellish those plots until they seem alive and new.

So finally, we come to the thing that I think went wrong with this movie. A film needs a director. The director not only has to understand all of the steps in the filmmaking process (writing, design, acting, photographic composition, editing), they have to understand something called dramaturgy. This, at least, is the approach to things that is taught at VGIK, and I think it's a good approach. If a director doesn't understand how to dynamically unfold a plot, well, they're finished.
And David McKean is finished. I hope that, if there is a next time, he and Neil Gaiman respect that and hire a director who knows what they're doing.