Del Toro compared the experience of seeing King's reaction to winning an Oscar. According to Del Toro, King squirmed when the Pale Man chased Ofelia. Stephen King attended a screening of the film and sat next to Guillermo del Toro. He didn't want any compromise in the storyline to suit the "market needs". Guillermo del Toro repeatedly said "no" to Hollywood producers, in spite of being offered double the budget provided the film was made in English. He no longer trusts translators after having encountered problems with his previous subtitled movies.
The English subtitles were translated and written by Guillermo del Toro himself. Mexico's entry to the Academy Awards, in the category of Best Film in a Foreign Language (2006).Īfter the first week, because so many parents brought small children to the film, movie theaters in Mexico placed signs on the posters warning about graphic violence. Received 22 minutes of applause at the Cannes Film Festival. This is easily the best film I've seen this year, and a must see on the big screen.IF YOU LIKE THE MOVIE THEN DO BUY THE ORIGINAL BLURAY/DVD The only real faults I am prepared to allow for this film is a slight tendency (particularly at the end) for a Narnia-like moralism, and the fact that the faun is, perhaps, is not quite wild enough! These are eminently forgivable, though. And all this backed up by the finest cinematography I've seen. In doing so, they will also discover a world of fairy tales which existed before Disney sunk its claws into them: a dangerous world, where nothing is as it seems and every step is a possible death a place which may leave even adults shivering under the duvet, part in terror, part in wonder. People will watch Pan's Labyrinth in a way that most won't watch Land and Freedom.
For all the evident truth of these observations, to accept them would be to entirely miss the majesty of Pan's Labyrinth, which doesn't lie in its originality but its absolute mastery of execution. There are also few ideas in the film's depiction of the Civil War that can't be read in Satre or Orwell can't be viewed in Picasso's Guernica or can't be watched in Land and Freedom. There are few ideas in the film's magical dreamworld that haven't been seen before. I suspect when the furore has died down some will choose to swing the pendulum back and criticise it for its more obvious faults. Apparently Pan's Labyrinth won a 20-minute standing ovation at Cannes, when it was shown. The poignancy of the film lies partly in the fact that the victories of the child are reflected so starkly by the failures of the adult world. As the twin plots progress, they intertwine, with the tasks of Ofelia becoming the choices faced by a Spain at the crossroads. Thus the film alternates between the world of Civil War Spain and the increasingly bizarre, dark and frightening world of the Pan's Labyrinth. Uncomfortable with her new surroundings, suspicious of her stepfather and desperately concerned about the worsening condition of her mother, Ofelia uncovers a strange alternative world, and the chance to escape forever the pain and uncertainty of her everyday life. Into this precarious situation come his new wife (a widow of a former marriage, who is carrying his son) and his stepdaughter Ofelia (played to absolute perfection, by the then 11 year old, Ivana Baquero). Sergi Lopez is excellent as the brutal (and possibly sadistic) Falangist Captain tasked with routing out the remaining leftists from the woods and hills of Northern Spain. Although the fantasy sequences are gorgeously realised, and are fairy tales in the truest sense (in that they are dark, fey, dangerous and violent), most of the story (about three quarters of it, in fact) exists outside of the dreamland, in the even more frightening (and sometimes shockingly violent) world of a real life struggle of ideas and ideology. This film is definitely not for young children. Set during Franco's mopping up exercise after the Spanish Civil War, Guillermo Del Toro's Pan's Labyrinth is a wonderful, dark fairy tale that, in a metaphor for Spain itself, teeters on the edge of nightmare dreamscapes of corruption, violence and the death of innocents.
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