What a joy it is to find a film that captures the true nature of a fairy tale. All too often films with a fantastical dimension resort to cuteness and sentimentality in order to become more palatable to children or extreme darkness and gore to court the older viewer. Yet director Guillermo del Toro manages to strike that delicate balance of innocence and evil and by doing so acknowledges a duality that exists in all good fairy tales: beauty and cruelty. Pan’s Labyrinth has both of these qualities; it is hauntingly beautiful and yet savagely cruel. The story centers on Ofelia, a young girl who accompanies her pregnant mother to the country to stay with her new stepfather, Captain Vidal, a fascist who is fighting the rebels in post-civil war Spain. The Captain is the father of the unborn child but upon their arrival Ofelia finds she dislikes him and later insists “he is not my father.”
Immediately after arriving in a countryside brutally ravaged by the last throws of the civil war, Ofelia, a lover of books and fairy tales, begins to find signs of enchantment in the form of a flying insect that she recognizes as a fairy. Sure enough, the creature is able to morph its winged, slender, stick-like shape into a flying sprite that eventually leads her through a stone maze, or labyrinth, and into the underworld where she meets a faun (presumably a version of Pan though del Toro says that Pan and the faun are not one and the same) who informs her that she is the princess of this realm. Long ago she left it for the world of light and forgot her father and his kingdom, but her spirit has returned in the form of Ofelia. She is given three tasks to perform to prove herself as the princess, and meets a pair of fantastical monsters along the way. The first is a giant toad that lives underground beneath a tree, and the second is the Pale man, a towering, white, nearly androgynous creature whose eyes are in his hands rather than on his face. It must be said that the special effects and visual style of the film are astonishing, not because they create something we have never conceived, but because the fantastic creations onscreen are so organic. Every thing in Pan’s Labyrinth is so visceral and tangible that it seems to have sprouted from the earth.
This film may be compared to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Spirited Away, and Alice in Wonderland. It may have many striking similarities with C.S. Lewis’ creation, and the young female protagonist alone in a strange and enchanted world is a trait common to them all. Another is originality. Though Pan’s Labyrinth is said to have borrowed from classical mythology, fairy tales, the classic Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive, and Borges, it takes its inspiration from these rich sources and creates its own distinctive world and populates it with creatures of a most relatable sort. Some are noble and virtuous, others despicable and horrific, but none are mere archetypes and this is its brilliance. It may be impossible to sympathize with Captain Vidal, but his unwavering discipline and commitment to his military cause reveals a man of intense though ultimately inhuman devotion. A quick study of history or even perusing One Hundred Years of Solitude will give you similar characters. Undoubtedly, del Toro’s film is ripe with political symbolism though my ignorance of this era and its conflict leaves me with only the basest of interpretations. Still, some of them are very hard not to see or at least dimly perceive, and it is the issue of perception that reverberates most loudly throughout Pan’s Labyrinth. Which is the real world and which the imaginative? Or are they one and the same? Which is more real, the Pale man or Captain Vidal? Which is more terrifying? The wonderful ambiguity that results from attempting to distinguish reality from fantasy is wonderfully articulated by New York Times critic A.O. Scott when he says “Pan’s Labyrinth is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Does the moral structure of the children’s story – with its clearly marked poles of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and vindication – illuminate the nature of authoritarian rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible fairy tale brought to life?” Perhaps the film leaves us somewhere in-between: remembering a beautiful, enchanting dream, but seeming to exist, in the words of A.O. Scott, “in the hard blue twilight of a world beyond the reach of fantasy.”
Immediately after arriving in a countryside brutally ravaged by the last throws of the civil war, Ofelia, a lover of books and fairy tales, begins to find signs of enchantment in the form of a flying insect that she recognizes as a fairy. Sure enough, the creature is able to morph its winged, slender, stick-like shape into a flying sprite that eventually leads her through a stone maze, or labyrinth, and into the underworld where she meets a faun (presumably a version of Pan though del Toro says that Pan and the faun are not one and the same) who informs her that she is the princess of this realm. Long ago she left it for the world of light and forgot her father and his kingdom, but her spirit has returned in the form of Ofelia. She is given three tasks to perform to prove herself as the princess, and meets a pair of fantastical monsters along the way. The first is a giant toad that lives underground beneath a tree, and the second is the Pale man, a towering, white, nearly androgynous creature whose eyes are in his hands rather than on his face. It must be said that the special effects and visual style of the film are astonishing, not because they create something we have never conceived, but because the fantastic creations onscreen are so organic. Every thing in Pan’s Labyrinth is so visceral and tangible that it seems to have sprouted from the earth.
This film may be compared to The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, Spirited Away, and Alice in Wonderland. It may have many striking similarities with C.S. Lewis’ creation, and the young female protagonist alone in a strange and enchanted world is a trait common to them all. Another is originality. Though Pan’s Labyrinth is said to have borrowed from classical mythology, fairy tales, the classic Spanish film Spirit of the Beehive, and Borges, it takes its inspiration from these rich sources and creates its own distinctive world and populates it with creatures of a most relatable sort. Some are noble and virtuous, others despicable and horrific, but none are mere archetypes and this is its brilliance. It may be impossible to sympathize with Captain Vidal, but his unwavering discipline and commitment to his military cause reveals a man of intense though ultimately inhuman devotion. A quick study of history or even perusing One Hundred Years of Solitude will give you similar characters. Undoubtedly, del Toro’s film is ripe with political symbolism though my ignorance of this era and its conflict leaves me with only the basest of interpretations. Still, some of them are very hard not to see or at least dimly perceive, and it is the issue of perception that reverberates most loudly throughout Pan’s Labyrinth. Which is the real world and which the imaginative? Or are they one and the same? Which is more real, the Pale man or Captain Vidal? Which is more terrifying? The wonderful ambiguity that results from attempting to distinguish reality from fantasy is wonderfully articulated by New York Times critic A.O. Scott when he says “Pan’s Labyrinth is a political fable in the guise of a fairy tale. Or maybe it’s the other way around. Does the moral structure of the children’s story – with its clearly marked poles of good and evil, its narrative of dispossession and vindication – illuminate the nature of authoritarian rule? Or does the movie reveal fascism as a terrible fairy tale brought to life?” Perhaps the film leaves us somewhere in-between: remembering a beautiful, enchanting dream, but seeming to exist, in the words of A.O. Scott, “in the hard blue twilight of a world beyond the reach of fantasy.”
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