During lesson, my classmates and I created a slideshow comparing Pan’s Labyrinth to the conventional (or generic) fantasy film. To do this we first had to define the corpus of a fantasy film or film series (our corpus was Harry Potter, Shrek and Lord of the Rings) and finding their repertoire of elements.
We found that Pan’s Labyrinth fits the genre in many ways as it shares much of it’s iconography with the films in our corpus. In Pan’s Labyrinth Ofelia faces off a monster to gain a dagger (and the dagger becomes a symbol of bravery), in both Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings the protagonists gain iconic blades of their own – both also signifying bravery. Pan’s Labyrinth also has the same settings as common fantasy films; much of it is set in the forest but there’s also a labyrinth and the insides of a large tree (contrastable to the Whomping Willow in Harry Potter and the trees inhabited by elves in Lord of the Rings). Ofelia is a generic protagonist, a princess who comes from the human world, is suddenly given a quest from someone from another world and her life as she knows it changes.
Pan’s Labyrinth is also unconventional in a number of other ways. The settings are much darker (both lighting wise and iconography wise – as shown in Slide 4) as areas like the labyrinth seem abandoned and the aforementioned tree is dying. The villain, Captain Vidal, is unique in that he’s a mortal human, instead of a wizard or a large magical floating eye. Captain Vidal is unique as he poses a very real threat not only to Ofelia but to the audience too. Instead of duels with spells and swords we only see the cruelty Captain Vidal inflicts, and are reminded that people like him exist in our world. Instead of the stock character of the wizened, ancient mentor (as seen in Dumbledore and Gandalf), Ofelia’s mentor is the Faun, who gives Ofelia her quests but little detail, giving her orders, not encouragement. The Faun even wilfully abandons Ofelia at one point, unlike Dumbledore and Gandalf who even sacrifice their own lives for Harry and Frodo. Guillermo del Toro is aware that good and bad is not all black and white, especially during wartime. This is another deviance between Pan’s Labyrinth and generic fantasy. All of the films in our corpus have the theme of good triumphing over the bad, but Pan’s Labyrinth is more complex in that it’s theme is disobedience. We admire Mercedes, Ofelia and the resistance fighters because they disobey their authority figures; Ofelia even sacrificing her own life in the ultimate act of disobedience against the Faun and Vidal to protect her baby brother.