Time: 1:41

Fall face-first into the Imaginarium of Dr. Terry Gilliam and take an outrageous ride through a surreal world you may not want to leave…depending on your imagination.

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a delicious fantasy about Parnassus, his mystical traveling show and the ordinary people in their audience who get a chance to walk through the “looking glass” imaginarium into an extraordinary world. The world is their wildest dreams, their worst nightmares. It’s an exploration of their imagination and psyche, good, bad or indifferent.

Dr. Parnassus has a dark secret and it has something to do with immortality, Tom Waits…ah, Mr. Nick (the devil) and his first-born daughter whose 16th birthday is looming large. The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a visual feast of magical madness. It’s the kind of movie where you forget you’re in a theatre. Like many of the story’s London audience members, you volunteer to step into the Imaginarium with delight. You go along on the adventure with Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer), Valentina (Lily Cole), Tony (Heath Ledger), Anton (Andrew Garfield) and Percy (Verne Troyer), hoping the journey is never-ending.

The film is a comedy, it’s a fantasy, it’s a drama. It’s delightfully difficult to pour into the dreaded marketing mold that rounds off the edges and flattens out capriciousness of any film run through the Hollywood factory.

Heath Ledger’s death caused by an accidental overdose of prescriptions meds during the filming of this movie was a shock to the actor’s fans and Hollywood. Ledger was 28, and although he died in Manhattan, he had been shooting The Imaginarium in London at the time of his death in January 2008.

After Gilliam decided to continue shooting and to finish the film in Ledger’s honor, he invited Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Ferrell to play “Imaginarium Tony #1, #2 and #3.” It was a stroke of brilliance, since the scenes shot with Depp, Law and Ferrell all take place in the extraordinary world of the Imaginarium, where imaginations determine physical being.

In an interview with Wired.com, Gilliam spoke about continuing production after Ledger’s death.

Wired.com: In the case of Imaginarium, after Ledger died, you reshot an early scene with a second actor to play the same minor character in order to establish the idea that people change appearance after they go through the magic mirror.

Gilliam: It’s all in my head, the kind of movie I’m making, so once I’ve got that happening, when I come up with a solution it’s always within the realm of the world that I’ve been working in. It’s just another way of looking at the world, Parnassus is doing that all the time, trying to encourage people to look at the world in a slightly different way. [To illustrate, Gilliam points to the hotel room TV set.] “That’s not a television. That’s a black hole in the wall. What happens if you fall into that black hole?” I’m very quick to do that and, frankly, it makes life bearable to me — the fact that I can keep on morphing the world into other things.

Wired.com: There’s a line in Imaginarium that sort of sums up Doctor Parnassus’ world view, something about the power of enchantment.

Gilliam: “The world is full of wonder for those with eyes to see.”

Read More of Wired.com’s interview http://www.wired.com/underwire/2010/01/imaginarium-terry-gilliam/2/#ixzz0gm0CNXLb

The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is a must-see film. Take your leap of imagination soon.