Pan's Labyrinth

Pan's Labyrinth The movie 'El Laberinto del Fauno' with 'Pan's Labyrinth' as English translation of the title directed by Del Toro revolves round the issue of the reason behind story telling. Although it is fact that in traditional fairy tales the validity and authenticity of magic and wonder is not questioned yet many characters in modern fairy tales fiction as well as movies are shown arguing that magic does not exist.

Why it is so that several stories conclude at the end that magic that the character and audiences experience while going through a story either reading it or watching in the form of a film is dismisses like a dream? is it so that some characters insist to privilege truth upon lies in the fiction fairy tale and films is merely setting up the corny argument that some lies tell a greater truth than just facts? The current essay is an exploration of the themes presented in "Pan's Labyrinth." In the background of the story of the film, the author will try to explore what has been actually depicted in this fairy tale film.

The author has particularly focused on the characterization and location of the film, the themes; narrative desires and disobedience and the struggle between evil and good. The Location and Characterization A sense of wonder is prominent in Pan's Labyrinth right from the beginning. The film starts with the voice of a story teller altogether with the images of an underground kingdom that are shown with the voice. The images itself are depiction of a magical location beyond the spatial location that can be accessed through worldly resources.

The story of the film tells the audience about a princess who is curious to know about the primary world but when she comes to the real world she forgets her reality and belonging to the underworld and dies as mortal. The father of the princess who is a king believes that her soul will come to the underground kingdom someday. The story now moves forward from this secondary world to the real world where the period of post-war Spain in 1944 is shown.

The imagery in the film even where real world is shown is shoot with a style; woods with golden tone having backlit, haloed pollen falling down in a magic way on a group of cars that are slowly running along a dirt road. The location of the Pan's Labyrinth is a simple mill. This location seems secondary in the perspective that the period of time shown in the film is very far past for the twenty fist century audience.

Shooting a time 50 years back is itself out of daily experiences of the modern audience. Del Toro described in the production notes that to distinct real and magic world the color and details were used which were short in the real world while the magic world was shown with details objects and saturated colors. The film revolves around the character Ofelia who is a girl entering into adolescence and has faith in fairy tales.

Ofelia who is living in a big city with her mother now travels to the woods that seem magical to go to live with her step father. Ofelia perceives woods as a magical world and this is clear in the beginning of the film. Being a child and having belief in fairy tales Ofelia believes in magic and magical characters. When the film reaches its climax Ofelia is shown speaking to a magical faun near the Labyrinth.

For a moment the focus of the scene switches as Captain Vidal enters searching Ofelia but he is unable to see the faun she is talking to. It has been discussed by many critics that the presence of children in fairy tales is considered essential because they have ability to feel the supernatural and have a sixth sense. This theme is very common in modern fairy tale films. This innocence is the main characteristic of fairy tale films.

In Pan's Labyrinth the focalization of Ofelia; her response to the metamorphosis of the stick bug into an actual fairy is wonder and is the strongest points that contribute to the sense of wonder in the film. It is her innocence and belief in fairy tales and magical characters that she does not hesitate to follow a fairy beckons when she asks Ofelia to come with her and takes her into a dark Labyrinth where she meets old Faun.

The Faun appears to be a monster but instead of being afraid from him Ofelia introduces herself and asks his name.

The Faun tells her that she is in fact Princes Moanna, "daughter of the King of the Underworld" but Ofelia does not believe and insists that her father was a tailor, but when Faun shows the birthmark in the shape of a moon that is an identification of a princess of the underworld kingdom she believe and starts accomplishing the tasks that are necessary to allow her to go back to her father's realm.

Theme: Desire and Disobedience In the beginning of the film, character Ofelia's mother who is pregnant takes a story book from her hands saying, "I don't understand why you had to bring so many books, Ofelia. Fairy tales, you're a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense." (Pan's Labyrinth, 2006) While saying these words to Ofelia, Carmon (mother) suddenly feels a desire to vomit.

Thus a very important theme of this movie can be presented as a warning: if you reject fairy tale it will make you barf. Though it is only a joke to give warning yet the story and storytelling in Pan's Labyrinth is not a matter of joke. In this film dominant attention has been given to storytelling instead of just as a magic potion for the hardships of real life.

Here the association between characters of the film and stories is a key to survival for both the tales themselves and the protagonists that narrate them. The main theme I am going to discuss in this essay is 'disobedience': the disobedience of characters of the film to fulfill desires of audience and formal generic expectations. Thus Pan's Labyrinth is the story which opposes the conventional and regulatory discourses of the characters as the same time the film also challenges the critics as well as viewers to produce reductive readings.

Overall Pan's Labyrinth is a genuine cinematic fairy tale film having all the elements of a formal fairy tale visual representation. Its literary taste, visual representation of imagery and magical world and monsters all are the elements of a fairy tale film. The traditional fairy tale image is obvious from its heroine like the other well-known heroines such as Snow White, Lewis Carroll's Alice and Dorothy of MGM's The Wizard of Oz (1939).

The association of heroine to the popular fairy tales heroines can be seen in the look of Ofelia; having black hair, white skin and red lips; her dress and pinafore that she gets from her mother and finally the red shoes she taps at the end of Pan's Labyrinth.

The inter-textual reference also represent the particular nature of the fairy story, in which recognizable imagery, structures of plot and types of characters from fairy tales have been shown but along with this, the film also represents other genres like eras political drama, horror, and dark fantasy. Thus the hybrid nature of Pan's Labyrinth depicts a form of disobedience for the expectations of viewers related to all the genres by making combination to the genres that are usually distinct.

Another notable thing is the informal 'disobedient' choices that the Guillermo Del Toro has made being director, writer and producer himself of the film. These choices have been described by him in his extra-dietetic-voice-over commentary on the DVD. In a fairy tale, disobedience is very important factor.

It is so important that Vladimir Propp has noted "interdiction" and "violation" of the interdiction functions II and III in "Morphology of the Folktale." Obviously often the particular act of disobedience sets the story in motion or helps to continue it on its trajectory. The disobedience in Snow White is shown when she does not obey the dwarves and replies the door to the witch; similarly Dorothy shows disobedience by running away from the farm; Alice does not accompany her sister in chasing the white rabbit.

In film Pan's Labyrinth, the basic theme is disobedience, which is shown as a positive power for the story and even essential for the survival of the positive characters. Also I would debate the disobedience is not just the base of the film Pan's Labyrinth but is closely relative to plot desires. Thematically, the film opposes martial patriarchal master narratives through the character of housekeeper Mercedes, who is a member of the anti-fascist rebels, and also via the disobedience of the character Ofelia.

The film interlinks discrete tales and storylines; engages both the genus of fairy story as well as the historical political confrontation film and claims that it is affiliated with the legends, mysterious, fictional and cinematic texts directly. Magic & Mimesis In the background of pot-Civil War Spain, Pan's Labyrinth is the tale of Ofelia. Ofelia is a young girl who along with her mother Carmen goes to live with her step father Vidal who is the fascist Captain.

With the progression of Carmon's difficult pregnancy, Captain Vidal wishes that his son must be born where his father is. At this point of the story, Captain Vidal is indulged in a military struggle against anti-fascist rebels in the mountains around the mill where the family is currently living. The housekeeper, spy and the secret rebel collaborator Mercedes make friends with Ofelia. Ofelia also encounters with a supernatural mythical faun in the primeval and breakdown labyrinth near the mill.

Here Ofelia has to confer life in two worlds; one is real world where she is the unwanted step daughter of the villain Captain Vidal and the other is the mythical world where must prove herself to be the princes Moana of the Underground realm and return to her fairy-tale father's world after the accomplishment of three tasks successfully.

By the end of the film the two world's crash explosively as Ofelia has to make an impossible decision as she has to surrender her newborn brother either to the Captain or the faun. Being a disobedient text, Pan's Labyrinth criticizes the political rule in practice both in the family and in the nation and this critiques has emerged in the film as openly associated to the narrative.

That is disobedience has been highlighted in the film through a planned play-by intentionally changing amongst its own devotion to and disobedience of narrative desires as they have been created and approved by narrative genres themselves in due course.

Brook's account of the "ambitious hero (who) stands as a figure of the reader's efforts to construct meanings in ever-larger wholes, to totalize his experience of human existence in time, to grasp past, present, and future in a significant shape" can easily mapped in the character of Captain Vidal who holds desire to create and control meaning for himself, his family and his nation. But as Captain Vidal who is the villain in this story so the audiences are not encouraged to identify with him.

Relatively as regards Ofelia and Mercedes, we oppose Vidal and his efforts to totalize meaning-making through the recognition and abhorring his philosophy and his ways to enforce his philosophy on others. Viewers opposition to Vidal comprise of our recognition with and support of the disobedience show by Ofelia and also for Mercedes's disturbances of his rarrativizing. This opposition is created through story telling as disobedient desire in the film; and in addition is produced cinematically.

The early critics who reviewed the film after it was displayed on screens in North America in 2006 discuss the tension between the real world and unreal or fantasy and there is a tendency of referring this film as a fairy tale for adults. In this context, Pan's Labyrinth has destabilized the generic expectations related to a modern fairy tale films because fairy tales are considered as just for the entertainment of children that adults also enjoy.

Comparatively, Pan's Labyrinth was not marketed as "fun for the whole family!" rather it is "R" rated, as the label attached to it states, "for graphic violence and some language," so even through its para-textual information, Pan's Labyrinth reveals its disobedience to the viewers expectations as they consider fairy tale movies for the entertainment of children. The construction of image of fairy tale for the entertainment arose out of eighteenth century image of the child.

Pan's Labyrinth has also questioned the imaginary political innocence of the fairy tale as it uses a child as a central character having violent and frightening adventures resonance mid-twentieth century horrors. Yet the generic amalgamation of the film is not set well with every viewer.

Lucins a reviewer of this film believes Pan's Labyrinth does not meet its publicity because of its refusal to meet audience expectations: "While it's true that fairy tales have different requirements than do tales of suspense, this particular fairy tale is a two-hour-long film and must be appreciated as such" (136). As the film is both much and not enough like a fairy tale, Shepard desires "that del Toro had chosen to make either a film about the Spanish Civil War or a fairy tale" (137).

Expressing his desire to read the story as a fairy tale of film script Shephard expresses to not to be able to exclude anything from the story, "apart from the verities that fascism is bad and young children are vulnerable" (137). Here Shepard's inability of recognizing the creative nature of this mixture of drama and fantasy means that the greater political critique of tyranny and the support of the inevitability of individuals of acting according to their beliefs while there is a national crisis are lost.

While questioning the vary relation of a fairy tale imagination with politics and real life, it seems that this reviewer make efforts to build some powerful generic distinctions and valuable judgments that protects the fairy tale as "marvelous." Tzvetan Todorov (1973) has categorized the fairy tale as consummate of marvelous, as "in the case of the marvelous, supernatural elements provoke no particular reaction either in the characters or in the implicit reader. It is not an attitude toward the events described which characterizes the marvelous, but the nature of these events" (54).

According Todorov, it is rather the marvelous which make it familiar at discourse level: "what distinguishes fairy tale is a certain kind of writing, not the status of the supernatural." (54). Yet Todorov has ignored the politics in describing the genre of fairy tale. With its opening scenes Pan's Labyrinth has troubled the limits of the views presented by the above critics regarding fairy tales. The early shots of the film have employed what Todorov points to as well as the cinematic techniques that points to mimesis.

In addition, the sequences of scenes of the film realign the chronological estrangement that Jackson has lamented by positioning the events of this fairy tale storyline within the actual historic moment of mid-twentieth century post civil war Spain.

An omniscient teller of tales introduces the story of Princess Moana and her flee from the Underground Kingdom as is framed a fairy tale, formally in English fairy tales start with "once upon a time" but as it was translations it starts with "A long time ago." The story of Underground kingdom and Princes starts in the far away past, and the story teller employs the "impersonal authoritative, all knowing voice" that Jackson has attributed to the account of marvelous fairy tales; yet, Pan's Labyrinth is according to the definition of Jackson as regards other aspects of film.

In the beginning of the film before the narrator introduces the underground realm the actual historic moment of 1944 is depicted through white titles with black background. The utilization of written titles for the representation of political troublesome period of Spain post civil war is the implication of a form of omniscient narrator that Jackson has identified as indication the mimetic by the way of "openings that make an implicit claim of equivalence between the represented fictional world and the real world outside the text (34).

Thus the beginning and sequence of initial shots in Pan's Labyrinth have been implemented both the story telling style of fairy tales as well as depiction of the mimetic period film and thus the film engages the viewers in both worlds at a moment actively. (3) Apart from this there were many reviewers who praised the film the way fairy tales has been used and also its editing. The effects used to obtain the vibrant tensions amongst both the worlds.

Yet it seems that some reviewers were not comfortable with the mixing of mimesis and magic. Initial reviews of the film devastatingly praise how the faun with magic world and Princes Moana seem depicting psychological somewhat that trying to engage in or contribute to the political assessment of film. In most of the review magic has been considered as a way to escape from the problems of real world that Ofelia faces.

For example Kara states, "Like so many unhappy children before her, Ofelia finds escape in a dream world of her own making," Similarly Laura describes that "it is clear that the woodland is the place that ignites Oflia's imagination and where she lives out her fantasies" (2). Another critic Jack Zips is of the view that "she wills herself into this tale, and for all intents and purposes, it is she who appropriates the tale and creates it so that she can deal with forces…impinging on her life" (238).

Lastly another reviewer Julian Smith has criticized how the clear hostility amongst the actual fascist Spain and fantasy world of Ofelia are smudged: "There are, indeed, gaping holes in the plot where elements first presented as fantastic are later revealed to have empirical presence in the real" (8) There are other reviewers who have praised the story of the film and the way it has been presented as it was a complex story to be presented in the form of film.

Peggy Yocom perceptively discusses that "every major character has compelling, contradictory relationship to story, especially the Captain"; more specifically, "the Captain also keeps his stories, like so much else, locked away. Only he can know them; only he will decide when and if, they will be told" (347). The competition between Evil and Good Guillermo Del Toro is known for managing this aspect of a fairy tale film. His previous experience of horror films such as "Devils' Backbone (2001)" as well as "Hellboy (2004)" deals with the struggle between evil and good.

He is also familiar with how to portray a terrible villain. His previous films such as Blade II that was released in 2002, Mimic released in 1997 and Cronos in 1993 all depict to some degree horror in particular the presentation of monsters. (32). As he was a part in the production of these films, Del Toro got enough experience to portray evil in the form of monsters in Pan's Labyrinth The villain of the film Captain Vidal represents as villain of real world and real life as a stepfather of Ofelia.

His evil actions in the film make it a decipherable fairy tale. The monsters presented in the film are embodiment of the demons that are present inside a man and this has been depicted in this film most efficiently using the available cinematic resources. In fairy tales internal conflicts and dilemmas are depicted using imagery for the portrayal of these psychological realities. (Luithi, 122).

Yet, in Pan's Labyrinth the details of the villain Vidal are not given (50) Every monster presented in Pan's labyrinth is deliberately evil even they do not regret for their evil and violent actions. Each is acting forced from unrestraint appetite for example the frog devours the tree and the Pale Man drinks the blood of innocents. Similarly Captain Vidal sucks the energy of every one around him. Except the character of Vidal all evil characters are monsters in their physical appearance.

Comparatively, Captain Vidal is handsome and well-manicured, carefully sprucing himself day by day and appears as a complete military man before his subjects.