There are a couple of different typical approaches to creating a film fantasy.
There’s the straightforward cinematic escapism, in which the audience experiences a distracting reality completely unconnected to their own. Think of the early Disney animated features, or, more recently, the Conan movies, Willow or Star Wars.
There’s escapism as part of the story itself, in which the protagonists escape the many problems of a mundane world that looks an awful lot like ours by traveling to a magical world in which they exert more control over their destinies. Think The Labyrinth, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (or, as I like to call it, CoN:LWW), or the Harry Potter movies.
There’s the symbolic fantasy, in which a story seemingly unconnected to the real world features characters and actions that form an allegory that comments on the events of the audience’s world, like the Lord of the Rings movies, or MirrorMask.
And then there’s what Guillermo del Toro does in Pan’s Labyrinth, blending all of these techniques in an effort not only to address the real world, but attack it.
Ivana Baquero plays Ofelia, a little girl in the last few years of little girlhood. She delights in the fantasy worlds of her books, and it’s little wonder, given the harsh realities of her life—her father is dead, and her mother is about to give birth to a second child, this one sired by the wicked man about to become her step-father, Capitán Vidal (Sergi López). At the film’s opening, Vidal, spoken of only as “The Captain,” is moving the pair of them to live with him in his rural fortress, where he is charged with distributing rations and clamping down on the Communist rebels living in the forest. The time is at the end of Spain’s brutal Civil War; the bad guys have won, although the fighting has yet to stop.
Lead on by what could be either a large winged insect or a fairy, depending on your point of view, Ofelia discovers a crumbling stone maze inhabited by a gigantic, moss-encrusted goat man. Referred to only as “the faun” in the film’s subtitles, this is apparently the Pan of the English title.
The Spanish title, incidentally, is El Labertinto del Fauno, so I can only assume they changed “Fauno” to “Pan” on the assumption that American audiences are too stupid to know what a faun is.
And what this faun is is cool. Played by Doug Jones in a marvelously designed costume with mechanically controlled eyes (with their oddly-shaped, goat-like pupils) and ears (which flit around as if to keep away barnyard insects). This is an incredibly scary goat man, one that would certainly make from the fey, scarf-wearing Mr. Tumnus from 2005’a Narnia crap his pants (if he wore pants).
Ofelia’s not scared, of course because, scary as this monster is on the outside, he’s less horrible than the Captain.
It tells Ofelia that she is really a princess, the typical child of destiny in these sorts of stories, and it gives her a magic book with instructions on three tasks to complete in order to escape her new father and, perhaps just as importantly, the world of her new father.
Ofelia never leaves this world completely though, and del Toro never turns his attention from it for long. Ofelia’s tasks take place in between scenes featuring the equally (if not more so) thrilling and dramatic goings-on around the Captain’s fortress and storehouse, as it seems there are more than a few sympathizers among his staff, particularly his housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), one of the only people at Ofelia’s new home that even seem to notice her.
Del Toro’s Hellboy and Blade II both showcased how well he works with special effects, mixing old-school tactics with computer wizardry to bring unbelievable sights to life in services of the stories. Though Pan’s Labyrinth is clearly the work of the same visual stylist, it bears the most in common with del Toro’s little seen 2001 film, The Devil’s Backbone.
In that, he embedded a simple ghost story into a tale of the Spanish Civil War, calling up incredible images that can only be created through. And that is, ultimately the purest test of great filmmaking, if the film tells a story that could only be told as a film.
Pan’s Labyrinth is such a film, but it features much, much more of the visual magic seen in del Toro’s previous war-time fantasy; if Backbone had at its heart a simple campfire ghost story, Pan’s Labyrinth has at its center an epic fairytale, one that alludes to and references others (the forbidden fairy foods, the meeting with the faun, Ofelia’s Alice in Wonderland dress, et cetera) without ever seeming like the pastiche it is.
But for all its fantasy elements, its not a straight fantasy film; Ofelia cannot escape her world for the neighboring one, and she has no more control there than she does in war-torn Spain.
Or, more accurately, she has no less control in her world than she does in the faun’s.
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