Name: Pan's Labyrinth: Crash Course Film Criticism #9
Uploaded: 2018-11-06T19:21:44.000Z
Duration: 11 min 21 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

From Georges Méliès's lunar landscape to the sands of Tatooine, movies have been

transporting us to different worlds since the beginning of cinema.

And a lot of these films use their fantasy worlds to comment on the real world that we

Avatar can be read as a plea to protect the natural world, while The Hunger Games takes

reality TV and income inequality to their brutal extremes.

And in 2006, a movie took on authoritarianism and the violent aftershocks of the Spanish

Civil War—all through the eyes of an innocent young girl and the fairy tale world she discovers

Filled with original imagery and drawing on folklore and fantasy traditions, Pan's Labyrinth

takes us on a journey to a place as violent and cruel as it is beautiful and compassionate.

Acclaimed Mexican writer-director Guillermo

del Toro was already an established filmmaker by the time he released Pan's Labyrinth

From the gothic horror of Cronos and The Devil's Backbone, to the sly humor of his comic book

adaptation Hellboy, del Toro had built a reputation.

He's known for embedding rich, sympathetic characters—especially children and otherworldly

With Pan's Labyrinth, he set out to combine both these impulses to create a story that

was half fantasy adventure, half historical political drama.

Set in 1944 just after the Spanish Civil War, the film follows Ofelia, played with wonder

She's a young girl traveling with her pregnant mother to join her stepfather in the Spanish

The forces of fascist dictator Francisco Franco have an outpost there, from which they hope

to exterminate the rest of the anti-fascist rebels hiding in the hills.

And Ofelia's stepfather, Captain Vidal, is the commander of this outpost.

Grimly portrayed by Sergi López, Vidal demands absolute loyalty and sees mercy as a sign

He won't hesitate to torture or kill anyone who even might be a threat to the new Spanish

Now, the film opens with an unnamed narrator telling the story of Princess Moanna, the

long lost daughter of the King of Underworld.

And Ofelia is a voracious reader, especially of fairy tales.

So whether that story is coming from her imagination or her books, or is the actual

truth of the film is hard to pin down at first.

But the movie does suggest there's more to Ofelia's story than meets the eye.

She escapes Vidal's outpost and discovers a fantasy world in an ancient stone labyrinth

There she meets a faun, as menacing as he is magical, who tells Ofelia that she may

And she has to complete three tasks to claim her birthright.

The action of the film then moves back and forth between these two worlds.

In one, Ofelia's mother Carmen, played by Ariadna Gil, fights illness as her due

Meanwhile, Vidal hunts the rebels, and Vidal's housekeeper Mercedes embarks on a dangerous

And in the fantasy realm, Ofelia gets a key from the belly of a giant toad, reclaims a

dagger from a child-eating monster called the Pale Man, and finally – after her mother

dies in childbirth and the rebels storm the outpost – she steals her baby half-brother

and brings him to the center of the labyrinth.

There, Ofelia is confronted with a final choice, to give the baby to the faun as a sacrifice

In the ultimate selfless act, Ofelia refuses them both, protecting her half-brother's

Vidal grabs the child and – spoiler alert – shoots Ofelia, leaving her for dead.

As her blood drips down into the labyrinth, Ofelia is magically transported to a golden

She finds herself healed, dressed in beautiful clothes, and wearing… not quite Ruby Slippers,

Her mother and father sit on two impossibly tall thrones, with a third seat for her.

And while we see Ofelia die in the real world, the closing narration tells us that she reigned

for centuries in the Underworld, that she was beloved by her people, and that traces

of her can still be found if you know where to look.

The film ends on the image of a flower opening on a branch Ofelia had once touched, suggesting

Pan's Labyrinth is a film of strong contradictions, as beautiful as it is bloody.

It's a fairy tale about a child, but also a violent, R-rated film clearly made for adults.

Our job as film critics is to reconcile these contradictions as we construct our reading

One way to look at Pan's Labyrinth is to consider it through the lens of folklore.

Scholars have long suggested that fairy tales give children a framework to understanding

the sometimes arbitrary and brutal world of adults.

In this reading, the fantasy world operates as Ofelia's way to interpret the real world.

I mean, think about it: here's a young girl, dumped onto the front lines of a violent conflict,

perpetrated by this scary man she's expected to call “Father.”

And on top of it all, her mother's in real danger.

The only way for Ofelia's mind to cope is to create a fantasy world through which she

can explore and understand what's actually happening to her.

And what's actually happening is downright disgusting.

del Toro rarely pulls the camera away from violence, forcing us to confront Vidal's

homicidal wrath as he smashes a man's face with a wine bottle, prepares to torture a

rebel, or shoots half a dozen people in cold blood.

Ofelia doesn't necessarily witness all of these attacks.

But Vidal's menace and sadism is so intense that the film suggests that Ofelia lives in

Which is exactly why Ofelia has invented the fairy tale half of the film.

American scholar and fairy tale expert Jack Zipes writes in the Journal

of American Folklore: “[Ofelia] wills herself into this tale … and creates it

so that she can deal with forces (her mother, Vidal, the end of the Civil War) impinging

What happens in the fairy tale is what provides her with the courage to oppose the real cruelty

Seen this way, when Ofelia outsmarts the giant toad and extracts the key or uses her ingenuity

to outwit and outrun the Pale Man, she's actually figuring out how to stand up to the

adults in her life who are ill-equipped or not willing to protect her.

del Toro's genius is to go back past the sanitized Disney version of fairy tales to

Subtitles ListPlay Video

Pan's Labyrinth: Crash Course Film Criticism #9

ultimate

ancient

represent

reality