Guillermo Del Toro: Pan's Labyrinth (2007)

In the movie, "Pan's Labyrinth" (2007) directed by Award-winning filmmaker Guillermo del Toro comes an "adult" fairytale where a little girl named Ofelia tries to "escape" from Spain, her hometown that has a lot of facism issues occuring at the time. She creates this fantasy world, where she is the princess of an immortal kingdom.  As the movie starts, it shows Del Toro's prologue about the making of the movie followed by a scene where the little girl's lifeless body hangs by a well, nose with a single trail of blood dripping into the well. I believe that this was Del Toro's way of grabbing the audience's attention at the beginning of the movie, leaving us full of curiousity.

In the movie, the topic "Facism" was often present in the scenes. It also showed evidence of the Spanish Civil War that was taking place in the movie. The suffering of people whether they were poor or rich was shown to create a realistic view on the issue at hand. The movie itself portrays a lot of different emotions throughout the scenes, especially at the endng when Ofelia  is sad about losing her mom who she was very close to,  but she was also overjoyed because she has a new brother.  The excitement she felt as she was to become princess in the immortal kingdom, the confusion she felt as she was to go through obstacles that she felt unsure about. The nervous feeling as the faun tells her that she failed an obstacle and can no longer complete her task to become a princess. The movie is definitely not recommended for young children as some of the scenes contains \a lot of violence, inappropriate character features that might scare the young viewers.  Although Del Toro did a wonderful job setting up the scenes, using his vivid imagination and applying his creative ideas to his work,  the way the props seemed realistic because of the added detail to his film.

I believe that this movie was Del Toro's best pieces of work. It was a very interesting movie that managed to captivate the audience's attention well, the way he managed to draw the audience into the immortal world and allow us to get an insight inside the kingdom, as well as a spectacular view at the characters that he invented. The topic that he used, "the Spanish Civil War" was a good topic because it's a strong subject that almost everyone can understand and relate to.  Del Toro's purpose of this movie was to let us think beyond ourselves and look at others, and see how poorly they were treated and it should make us feel thankful for what we have because WE are very fortunate. In order to understand others, we have to understand ourselves. Although I believe that Del Toro did a good job, I have to agree with others that he could have improved in some ways. I feel that he could have done better when it came to explaining the audience about the Civil War. Perhaps he could have added a few more descriptions to make our understandings more clear.

Overall this was a good movie and I enjoyed watching it with the class. It was very interesting and I was too drawn into the movie to even glance away from the screen. A job well-done for Del Toro!