[From the Director of The Shape of Water] Pan’s Labyrinth [Impressions & Review]
Hello!
Today I thought I’d review a film by Guillermo del Toro, the director who swept up a pile of Academy Awards recently with The Shape of Water.
The trailer is here
And this is the director
He’s got such a gentle face.
He’s a huge geek, and he is enormously fond of Japanese tokusatsu and that whole world.
That love comes through clearly enough in things like Pacific Rim, I think lol
Contents
Story
Ofelia is a girl who lost her father in the Spanish Civil War. She and her pregnant mother are taken in by Vidal, her mother’s new husband and a captain in the army of the dictatorship, and they move to a military outpost in the middle of a forest. The cold-blooded Vidal, who commands the sweep against the resistance, cares about nothing but the child he is about to have, and her mother spends all her time reading the captain’s wishes, so Ofelia is left ignored. The one who keeps her company is Mercedes, the housekeeper at the outpost, but Mercedes’ younger brother has thrown himself into the resistance movement, and she too has been helping them behind the captain’s back. Life at the outpost grows heavier and heavier for Ofelia, and her mind is drawn away into a world of fairies and fairy tales.
One night a fairy appears before Ofelia and leads her to a labyrinth deep in the forest. Pan, the keeper of the labyrinth, is waiting there, and one look at her is all he needs before he tells her: “you are the princess of the underground kingdom.”
- (The tale the film opens with, in brief: long ago there was a kingdom underground with no illness and no suffering in it, and a princess there who dreamed of the breeze and the sunlight and the blue sky. One day she slipped out of the castle and went to the human world, and the moment the bright sun touched her she forgot who she was and where she had come from. From then on she felt cold and pain and suffering, and in the end she died. The king grieved for the daughter he had lost, but he knew her soul would return one day, and he went on waiting for that day, for ever and ever.)
Pan tells her that this labyrinth is the entrance to the underground kingdom, and that she must complete three trials before it can be confirmed that she is the princess. And so Ofelia sets out to take on the three trials Pan has given her.
All the while Ofelia is visiting the world of fantasy, the captain’s merciless reality is unfolding, and it eats into both Ofelia’s fantasy and the real world, casting a dark shadow over the two worlds.
— Wikipedia
Impressions & Review
My reaction was: this is massively influenced by Spirited Away!!!
- An eerie stone statue
- Wandering into a strange world
- Being handed trials by the inhabitants of that strange world
- A small creature becoming her partner
All of that and plenty more had me thinking of Spirited Away lol
Not a rip-off though — what I felt was burning respect for Japanese culture!
That’s Guillermo for you.
The Pale Man
The thing to single out in this film has to be the monsters that turn up in it!
And among them, the Pale Man with the eyes in his hands had the coolest design of the lot lol
And on top of that, Doug Jones, who played this Pale Man, also plays Pan in the same film and the strange creature in The Shape of Water.
Fantasy and reality, fused
The setting is somewhere around the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and a film like this one that carries the character of a war film is very rare, I think.
And it still has proper fantasy elements firmly in place on top of that, which made for an extremely interesting theme, I think.
The final stretch in particular has a Christian flavour to it, and there was something of The Chronicles of Narnia in the atmosphere too.
Ah, and it was lovely that the protagonist is such a pure, good kid.
