Pan’s Labyrinth

Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo Del Toro delivers a unique, richly imagined epic with Pan’s Labyrinth released in 2006, a gothic fairy tale set against the postwar repression of Franco's Spain. Del Toro's sixth and most ambitious film, Pan’s Labyrinth harnesses the formal characteristics of classic folklore to a 20th Century period. Del Toro portrays a child as the key character, to communicate that children minds are not cemented. Children avoid reality through the subconscious imagination which is untainted by a grown-up person, so through a point of an innocent child more is captured. The film showcases what the imagination can do as a means of escape to comfort the physical trials one goes through in
Del Toro conceived his film in a rather opposite perspective than other typical movies. In Pan's Labyrinth everything becomes a symbol from the actor to the background set-up. Del Toro is an erudite creator to whom the images and icons of past ages are the manifold fragments of an occult and mystic truth. In his point of view, directing a film is the art of putting together those fragments in a coherent discourse. Hence, in Pan's Labyrinth a broken watch can speak to the viewer with the same power as the acting does. Del Toro's filming transforms statue into actor and actor into statue, because the lineament of the image and the meaning they convey are worthy of dramatic emotion. Del Toro's mise en scène process, rather than writing then applying spectacular cinema technique, is to write with symbols and icons. An example of that would be the classic symbols of fairy stories are also used to represent the imaginary world in which Ofelia travels. The labyrinth symbolizes the choices she has to make in her journey and the obstacles she has to face. The cast of mythical characters; those of fauns and fairies, and giant toads that niche under fig trees and how they are located deep in the dark, mystical forest Akin to a writer, Del Toro finds the appropriate symbol as much for its meaning as for its beauty and assemble them into relevant and aesthetic cinematographic syntax.

The fairy tale, significant in