Pan's Labyrinth (El laberinto del fauno) |
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Pan's Labyrinth theatrical poster |
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Directed by | Guillermo del Toro |
Produced by | Guillermo del Toro Alfonso Cuarón Bertha Navarro Frida Torresblanco Alvaro Augustin |
Written by | Guillermo del Toro |
Starring | Ivana Baquero Doug Jones Sergi López Maribel Verdú Ariadna Gil Álex Angulo |
Music by | Javier Navarrete |
Cinematography | Guillermo Navarro |
Editing by | Bernat Vilaplana |
Distributed by | Mexico: Warner Bros. United Kingdom: Optimum Releasing United States: Picturehouse |
Release date(s) | Spain: October 11, 2006 Mexico: October 20, 2006 United Kingdom: November 24, 2006 United States: December 29, 2006 |
Running time | Theatrical Cut: 112 min. UK Theatrical Cut: 119 min. |
Country | ![]() ![]() |
Language | Spanish |
Budget | $19 million[1] |
Gross revenue | $83 million[1] |
Pan's Labyrinth (Spanish: El laberinto del fauno, literally The Labyrinth of the Faun) is a 2006 Spanish language fantasy film[2][3] written and directed by Mexican film-maker Guillermo del Toro. It was produced and distributed by the Mexican film company Esperanto Films.
Pan's Labyrinth takes place in Spain in May and June, 1944, after the Spanish Civil War, during the Franquist repression. Also present is the main character Ofelia's fantasy world which centers around an overgrown abandoned labyrinth. Ofelia's stepfather, the Falangist Captain Vidal, viciously hunts the Spanish Maquis, guerrillas who fight against the Franco regime in the region, while Ofelia's pregnant mother grows increasingly ill. Ofelia meets several strange and magical creatures who become central to her story, leading her through the trials of the old labyrinth garden. The film employs make-up, puppetry, and CGI effects to create its creatures.
Del Toro stated that he considers the story to be a parable, influenced by fairy tales, and that it addresses and continues themes related to his earlier film The Devil's Backbone[3], to which Pan's Labyrinth is a spiritual sequel. The original Spanish title refers to the mythological fauns of Greek mythology, while the English title refers specifically to the faun-like Greek character Pan (intended to help English-speakers differentiate the title from the term fawn). However, del Toro has stated that the faun in the film is not Pan.[3]
The film premiered at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival. It was released in the United Kingdom on November 24, 2006. In the United States and Canada, the film was given a limited release on December 29, 2006, with a wide release on January 19, 2007.[4] Pan's Labyrinth has won numerous international awards, including three Academy Awards, the Ariel Award for Best Picture, and the 2007 Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.
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The movie opens with a fairy tale. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero), a young girl who loves to read, lies on the ground, bleeding, while the narration explains that Princess Moanna of the Underground Realm, curious about the world above, escapes to the Earth, where the sun blinds her and, forgetting her past, she weakens and dies. Nonetheless, her father retains hope that her spirit will eventually return to him.
The story then cuts to post-Civil War Spain in 1944, with Francisco Franco firmly in power. Ofelia has traveled with her pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to join Captain Vidal (Sergi López i Ayats), her new stepfather and father of Carmen's unborn child, at his post in the mountains where he is rooting out Spanish Maquis guerillas, on the North-West Spanish Region.
Ofelia discovers a stick insect that she believes to be a fairy. It follows her to the mill where Vidal is stationed. Ofelia chases it into an ancient labyrinth nearby. Ofelia meets Vidal's housekeeper, Mercedes (Maribel Verdú), who treats her kindly. Later that night, Ofelia overhears Mercedes and the local doctor conspiring to help the rebels. Upon her mother's request, Ofelia tells a surprisingly mature story to her unborn brother, a fable about pain and loss, and the promise of eternal life. After waking her in the middle of the night, the insect appears in Ofelia's bedroom where it changes into a fairy and leads her outside and through the labyrinth. There, she meets a faun (Doug Jones), who says that he believes her to be Princess Moanna. He gives her three tasks to complete before the full moon to ensure that her "essence is intact" so that she can return to her father's realm.
Ofelia completes the first task of retrieving a key from the belly of a giant toad that lives deep beneath the roots of a fig tree. Ofelia is becoming more worried about her mother, who has been ordered to stay in bed as her condition has worsened. The faun tells Ofelia of a magic way to restore her mother to health : Placing a mandrake root in a bowl of fresh milk underneath her bed. Meanwhile, her stepfather is proving to be a brutish, violently cruel man. Ofelia then undertakes the second task of using the key to retrieve an ornate dagger from the lair of the Pale Man (also played by Jones), a grotesque, child-eating monster who sits absolutely silent and motionless in front of a large feast. Although she was gravely warned not to consume anything, she eats two grapes, awakening the Pale Man, who eats two of her fairy friends and pursues her. She narrowly escapes by drawing an escape door with a piece of chalk. However, infuriated at her disobedience for having eaten the grapes and causing the fairies' death, the faun refuses to give her the third task.
Events in the real world take an even grimmer turn as Vidal captures and brutally interrogates a rebel. The doctor who has been staying with them to help Carmen is ordered to tend the wounds of the tortured rebel, so that he can be interrogated further. Instead, at the rebel's request, the doctor kills him to end his ordeal. Vidal kills the doctor for his disobedience and betrayal, angered by the doctor's statement that only a man such as Vidal could practice such blind, unthinking obedience with no concern for the consequences. Just as the doctor dies, Carmen goes into labor and starts hemorrhaging after the discovery and burning of the mandrake root. She dies in childbirth, but delivers a healthy son—Vidal had said that if only one could be saved, that it should be his son. Vidal discovers that Mercedes is a spy, and he captures her and Ofelia as they attempt to escape. Ofelia is locked in her bedroom, and Mercedes is taken to be tortured; however, she frees herself using a hidden knife with which she stabs and slashes Vidal, though not fatally. She then flees but is caught. At the last moment, the rebels, her brother among them, arrive and rescue her.
The faun returns to Ofelia and gives her one more chance to prove herself. He tells her to take her baby brother into the labyrinth. She then uses the magic chalk to escape her room and sneak into Vidal's room. She drugs Vidal and grabs her brother; although disoriented, Vidal chases her through the labyrinth while the rebels attack the mill and Mercedes searches for her. Upon reaching the center, the faun tells Ofelia that the portal to the underworld will open only with the blood of an innocent, so he needs a drop of her brother's blood. Ofelia, unsure of his intentions, refuses to allow her brother to be harmed. Furiously, the faun berates her and vanishes. Vidal finds her, takes the baby and shoots Ofelia in the stomach. She falls to the ground, bleeding.
When Vidal leaves the labyrinth, the rebels and Mercedes are waiting for him. Realizing that he will die, he calmly hands Mercedes the baby, and starts to make a request that they tell his son about his heroic father, but Mercedes informs him that his son "will never even know his name." Pedro, one of the rebels and Mercedes' brother, shoots Vidal in the face, killing him.
Mercedes and the rebels enter the labyrinth to find Ofelia dying, in a reprise of the opening scene. While Ofelia's blood drips onto the altar that was the gateway into the underworld, the scene flashes to a dream-like state: Ofelia is reunited with the king (Federico Luppi) (her deceased father, resurrected) and queen (her mother, alive again) of the underworld. The faun is there, as are the fairies. Ofelia learns that by sacrificing herself, instead of her brother, she has succeeded at the true final task, proving herself to be the Princess Moanna and achieving immortality. The moment Ofelia learns she is the Princess in the underworld, she smiles; at that same instant, in the real world, she dies. The final scene shows a small white flower blooming on the fig tree where the giant toad lived, slowly coming back to life. It represents the traces of her life as a mortal on earth.
Due to many people not knowing if she had truly died at the end, in an interview, del Toro clarified that, in his own view, the fantasy world isn't only Ofelia's imagination; the Underground Realm does exist, and in the end, Ofelia does actually escape to the fantasy world (where she would be more happy to live in than the real world).[5]
The idea for Pan's Labyrinth came from Guillermo del Toro's notebooks, which he says are filled with "doodles, ideas, drawings and plot bits." He had been keeping these notebooks for twenty years.[11] At one point during production, he left the notebook in a taxi in London and was distraught, but the cabbie returned it to him two days later.[12] Though he originally wrote a story about a pregnant woman who falls in love with a faun,[13] Sergi López said that del Toro described the final version of the plot a year and a half before filming. Lopez said that "for two hours and a half he explained to me all the movie, but with all the details, it was incredible, and when he finished I said, 'You have a script?' He said, 'No, nothing is written.'" López agreed to act in the movie and received the script one year later; he's said that "it was exactly the same, it was incredible. In his little head he had all the history with a lot of little detail, a lot of characters, like now when you look at the movie, it was exactly what he had in his head." [14]
Del Toro got the idea of Pan from childhood experiences with "lucid dreaming." He stated on The Charlie Rose Show that every midnight, he would wake up, and a faun would gradually step out from behind the grandfather's clock[15]. Originally, Pan was supposed to be a classic half-man, half-goat faun fraught with beauty. But in the end, Pan was altered into a goat-faced creature almost completely made out of earth, moss, vines, and tree bark. He became a mysterious, semi-suspicious relic who gave both the impression of trustworthiness and many signs that warn someone to never confide in him at all.
Del Toro has said the film has strong connections in theme to The Devil's Backbone and should be seen as an informal sequel dealing with some of the issues raised there. Some of the other works he drew on for inspiration include Lewis Carroll's "Alice" books, Jorge Luis Borges' Ficciones, Arthur Machen's The Great God Pan and The White People, Lord Dunsany's The Blessing of Pan, Algernon Blackwood's Pan's Garden and Francisco Goya's works. In 2004, del Toro said: "Pan is an original story. Some of my favorite writers (Borges, Blackwood, Machen, Dunsany) have explored the figure of the god Pan and the symbol of the labyrinth. These are things that I find very compelling and I am trying to mix them and play with them."[16] It was also influenced by the illustrations of Arthur Rackham.[17]
Del Toro intended to include a fairy tale about a dragon for Ophelia to narrate to her unborn brother. The tale involved the dragon, named Varanium Silex, who guarded a mountain surrounded by thorns, but as its peak is a blue rose that can grant immortality. The dragon and the thorns ward off many men though, who decide it is better to avoid pain than to be given immortality. Although the scene was thematically important, it was cut for budget reasons.[18]
There are differing ideas about the film's religious influences. Del Toro himself has said that he considers Pan's Labyrinth "a truly profane film, a layman's riff on Catholic dogma", but that his friend Alejandro González Iñárritu described it as "a truly Catholic film". Del Toro's explanation is "once a Catholic, always a Catholic".[17]
Guillermo Navarro, the director of photography, said that "after doing work in Hollywood on other movies and with other directors, working in our original language in different scenery brings me back to the original reasons I wanted to make movies, which is basically to tell stories with complete freedom and to let the visuals really contribute to the telling of the story."[19]
Pan's Labyrinth employs some computer generated imagery in its effects, but also uses complex make-up and puppetry. The giant toad was inspired by The Maze. Del Toro himself performed the noises. The mandrake root is a combination of puppetry and CGI. Del Toro wanted the fairies "to look like little monkeys, like dirty fairies," but the animation company had the idea to give them wings made of leaves.[20]
Jones spent five hours putting on make-up for the faun, which was mostly latex foam. He operated the faun's legs, while his own were digitally erased. Puppeteers helped to operate his face. Del Toro told Jones to "go rock star... like a glam rocker. But less David Bowie, more Mick Jagger."[20] Del Toro also had the faun grow younger as the movie progressed.
Jones said that he had to look out of the Pale Man's nostrils. The Pale Man's legs were attached to the front of his over a green leotard.[21]
The film uses subtitles for its translation into other languages, including English. Del Toro wrote them himself, because he was disappointed with the subtitles of his previous Spanish film, The Devil's Backbone. In an interview, he said that they were "for the thinking impaired" and "incredibly bad." He spent a month working with two other people, and said that he didn't want it to "feel like... watching a subtitled film."[22]
Pan's Labyrinth was first released at the 2006 Cannes Film Festival on May 27, 2006. Its first premiere in an English-speaking country was at the London FrightFest Film Festival on August 25, 2006.[23] Its first general release was in Spain on October 11, 2006, followed by a release in Mexico nine days later.[23] On November 24, 2006 it had its first general English release in the United Kingdom; that month it was also released in France, Serbia, Belgium, Italy, Russia, Singapore and South Korea.[23] It had a limited release in Canada and the United States on December 29, 2006, in Australia on January 18, 2007, in Taiwan on April 27, 2007, in Slovenia on May 17, 2007 and in Japan on September 29, 2007.[23] Its widest release in the United States was in 1,143 theatres.[4]
The film was released on DVD on March 12, 2007 in the UK by Optimum Releasing in a two-disc special edition. The film was released in the US on May 15, 2007 from New Line Home Entertainment in both single-disc and double-disc special edition versions, featuring an additional DTS-ES audio track not present on the UK version. Additionally, the film received a special limited edition release in South Korea and Germany. Only 20,000 copies of this edition were manufactured. It is presented in a digipak designed to look like the Book of Crossroads. The Korean edition contains two DVDs along with an art book and replica of Ofelia's key. The German special limited edition contains three DVDs and a book containing the movie's storyboard. Pan's Labyrinth was released for download on June 22, 2007 from Channel 4's on-demand service, 4oD.
High definition versions of Pan's Labyrinth were released in December 2007 on both Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD formats. New Line has stated that due to their announcement of supporting Blu-ray exclusively, thus dropping HD DVD support with immediate effect, Pan's Labyrinth will be the first and last HD DVD release for the studio, and would be discontinued after current stock is depleted.[24] Both versions had a PiP commentary while web extras were exclusive to the HD DVD version .[25][26] The audio for both versions were presented in DTS-HD Lossless Master Audio track in 7.1 Surround, which was a first for New Line Home Entertainment.[27]
Academy Awards |
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Ariel Awards |
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BAFTA Awards |
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Constellation Awards |
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Fantasporto |
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Goya Awards |
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National Society of Film Critics |
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Saturn Awards |
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Spacey Awards |
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The film has a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes,[28] and a 100 percent rating among the "Cream of the Crop" critics.[28] It received a 98% rating at Metacritic,[29] making it Metacritic's fourth highest rated movie of all time.[30] At its Cannes Film Festival release, it received a 22 minute standing ovation.[31] It also received a standing ovation at the 2006 Toronto International Film Festival,[32] its first release in the Americas.
Mark Kermode, in The Observer, labeled Pan's Labyrinth as the best film of 2006, describing it as "an epic, poetic vision in which the grim realities of war are matched and mirrored by a descent into an underworld populated by fearsomely beautiful monsters."[33] Stephanie Zacharek wrote that the film "works on so many levels that it seems to change shape even as you watch it,"[34] and Jim Emerson called the film "a fairy tale of such potency and awesome beauty that it reconnects the adult imagination to the primal thrill and horror of the stories that held us spellbound as children."[35] Roger Ebert reviewed the film after his surgery and it was put on his Great Movies series on August 27, 2007[36] and when he did his belated top ten films of 2006 Pan's Labyrinth was #1 with him stating "But even in a good year I'm unable to see everything. And I'm still not finished with my 2006 discoveries. I'm still looking at more 2007 movies, too, and that list will run as usual in late December. Nothing I am likely to see, however, is likely to change my conviction that the year's best film was 'Pan's Labyrinth.'"[37] The New Yorker's Anthony Lane took special note of the film's sound design, saying it "discards any hint of the ethereal by turning up the volume on small, supercharged noises: the creak of the Captain's leather gloves... the nighttime complaints of floorboard and rafter...."[38] Some reviewers had criticisms, however: for The San Diego Union-Tribune, David Elliott said "the excitement is tangible," but added that "what it lacks is successful unity... Del Toro has the art of many parts, but only makes them cohere as a sort of fevered extravaganza." [39] New York Press critic Armond White criticized the film saying that the "superfluous addition of del Toro's fairy-tale sensibility to real human misery made that story insufferable [and that] only critics and fanboys (not the general public) fell for its titular allusion to Borges".[40]
During its limited first three weeks at the United States box office, the film made $5.4 million. As of March 1, 2007, it has grossed over $37 million in North America, and grossed $80 million worldwide.[4] In Spain, it grossed almost $12 million, and it is the fourth highest domestically grossing foreign film in the United States.[4] In the United States, it has generated $55 million from its DVD Sales and Rentals. [1][4]
It has also earned BAFTA awards for Best Film Not in English, Costume Design, and Makeup and Hair.[41] At the Goya Awards, the Spanish equivalent of the Academy Awards, the film won in many categories including Best Cinematography, Editing, Make Up & Hairstyles, New Actress for Ivana Baquero, Original Screenplay, Sound and Special Effects. At Mexico's Ariel Awards, the movie won in 8 categories, including Best Movie and Best Director. The film won the top award at the 2007 edition of Fantasporto. At the 2007 Saturn Awards, it received accolades for Best International Film and Best Performance by a Younger Actor for Ivana Baquero.[42] The film also won "Best Film" at the 2007 Spacey Awards,[43] and "Best Science Fiction Film, TV Movie, or Mini-Series of 2006" at the 2007 Constellation Awards.[44] It also won the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form in 2007.[45]
The film was also nominated for a number of other awards such as Best Foreign Film at the Academy Awards[46] and the Golden Globes[47] in 2007.
The film appeared on many critics' top ten lists of the best films of 2006.[48]
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General top ten
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In 2007, del Toro noted the striking similarities between his film and Disney's The Chronicles of Narnia: both films are set around the same time, have similar child-age principal characters, mythic creatures (particularly the fauns), and themes of "disobedience and choice." Says del Toro: "This is my version of that universe, not only 'Narnia,' but that universe of children's literature."[49] In fact, del Toro was asked to direct The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe but turned it down for Pan's Labyrinth.[49]
In addition to Narnia, Pan's Labyrinth has also been compared to films such as Gabor Csupo's Bridge to Terabithia and Jim Henson's Labyrinth.[50][51] Del Toro himself has noted similarities with The Spirit of the Beehive.[52]
Pan's Labyrinth | ||
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Film score by Javier Navarrete | ||
Released | December 19, 2006 | |
Genre | Film soundtrack | |
Label | Milan Entertainment | |
Producer | Emmanuel Chamboredon Ian P. Hierons |
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The score for Pan's Labyrinth, composed by Javier Navarrete, was released on December 19, 2006.[53] Navarette and the score were nominated for an Academy Award.[46] It was entirely structured around a lullaby, and del Toro had the entire score included on the soundtrack, even though much of it had been cut during production.[53] The art used for the soundtrack cover was the unutilized Drew Struzan promotional poster for the film.
Awards | ||
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Preceded by John Myhre and Gretchen Rau for Memoirs of a Geisha |
Academy Award for Best Art Direction Eugenio Caballero and Pilar Revuelta 2006 |
Succeeded by Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo for Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street |
Preceded by Dion Beebe for Memoirs of a Geisha |
Academy Award for Best Cinematography Guillermo Navarro 2006 |
Succeeded by Robert Elswit for There Will Be Blood |
Preceded by Tami Lane and Howard Berger for The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe |
Academy Award for Makeup David Martí and Montse Ribé 2006 |
Succeeded by Didier Lavergne and Jan Archibald for La Vie en Rose |
Preceded by The Beat that My Heart Skipped |
BAFTA Award for Best Film Not in the English Language 2006 |
Succeeded by The Lives of Others |
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