Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth can be most accurately summarized as a fairytale turned nightmare, characterized by grotesque mutations of beloved creatures both real and imaginary. Though the film seems most obviously to be the nightmare of a little girl lost in an unrelenting world of pain, violence, and death, the nightmare is not contained; all people who inhabit the valley are caught in a nightmarish manifest of the world authorized by Fascist regime. Magical realism is a fragile creature, too much pressure in any direction and the creature collapses into a silly Cinderella. Del Toro knew how much pressure to apply to each of the story’s parts to make it all work very well. That’s why Pan’s Labyrinth, to me, is the one of most complex movies I have ever watched, yet, simply structured.

Two particular importances in the movie were Ofelia, the young and frightened girl who merely wants to leave the nightmare of reality and embrace the decaying fantasy of her dreams, and Captain Vidal, the one who propagates the nightmare for the rest of the valley. Del Toro chose two people to contrast from each other to portray the definition of good versus evil. Every movie viewer including me could tell that Del Toro heavily emphasized on the idea of disobedience throughout the movie and the way Del Toro paralleled with the disobedience was displaying the scenes with the gore and disturbing images. That is what makes tragedy so tragic, the inevitability of it all. This type of narrative requires bloodshed and sacrifice, and the film offers up a heaping plateful of bloody violence, torture and death.

Besides the unpleasant scriptures in the movie, there are millions of symbols and unanswered questions in the movie, so I will only mention about one thing which is the religious parallels between the movie and the bible. As Del Toro emphasized on the term of sacrifice, I could identify the sacrifice of Ofelia for her baby brother as a parallel of crucifixion of Jesus. Jesus sacrificed for millions of sinners to cleanse whole community and refresh whole world with new hope. According to that, the new hope Del Toro gave us was the reincarnation of Ofelia to rejoice with her fictional parents in some kind of heavenly kingdom. Also the temptation of Ofelia led to the betrayal of Faun by eating the grape which Faun had forbidden her to do greatly image the allusion in the bible. Adam and Eve ignored the warnings of God and eventually ate the fruit which resulted in an exile from Garden of Eden. There are so much of symbols for us to analyze Del Toro’s way of approach to the world today.

What finally makes this film work so well is that the fabulous is not at all childish; it is a mix of the child-like and the recognition that the world is more complex than a child can tend to understand. At first, this adds a level of strange beauty to what is a very tense situation. Later it becomes the reason for us to despise the things that men do when we see a man destroy the barer of this imaginary ambience. Even for adults, a world minus magic is a cold place.

I post this note to make this as a disclaimer for forgetting to cite the first three sentences of the paragraph. As a freshman undergraduate, I will continue to improve and cite the sources properly.