Pan's Labyrinth

I thought this movie wasn't so magically/fairy tale terrifying as it was a bloody war movie. The amount of blood in the movie was extreme, and so was the amount of killing and torture. However, the story centered only around Ofelia was very much like a fairy tale.

There were many magical creatures in the movie, even if they were slightly grotesque. There was the faun, which is a character that has appeared in many myths and fairy tales. However, when I think of a faun I think of Mr Tumnus from The Chronicles of Narnia, and he is a nice faun. The faun from the labyrinth was much more sinister. There were also fairies, portrayed as we typically think of them, small and with wings. However, in The Mists of Avalon (which I'm reading for my English class), the fairies are portrayed as human-sized people whose kingdom does not follow the normal flow of time.

Another of the magical creatures was the giant toad in the tree. While he was disgusting, he was definitely the least horrifying of the creatures. The creature under the house, with the eyes in his hands, was absolutely terrifying. The pictures of him eating the children again reminded me of Tiffauges, for whose appetite for children replaces his appetite for real food. The mandrake, although it only had a small part, was another magical creature. In one of the Harry Potter movies, they use a mandrake, which, like in this movie, looks exactly like a child. In both movies, the mandrake also cries like a child.

Like Run Lola Run and other fairy tales, Ofelia is given three chances to accomplish her mission. Once again, I didn't like the open-endedness of the ending. I thought that of course Ofelia made it back to her kingdom, and that her earthly body died. But when I was talking about it with my boyfriend, he said, 'How do you know the story wasn't all in her head, and that she really just died in the end?' I argued with him about it, because I didn't like how you never know what happened.