Diana Campos
English 1301 word count: 1,114
Pan's Labyrinth Pan's Labyrinth is a movie made by Guillermo del Toro in 2006. Guillermo del Toro was born on October, 9, 1964 in Guadalajara Jalisco, Mexico. Guillermo is a Mexican film director, screenwriter, producer and novelist. Guillermo studied special effects and make-up with the special effects artist David Smith. He spent ten years as a special effect make-up designer and formed his own company, Necropia. Later on his directing career, he formed his own production company, the Tequila Gang. Guillermo has combined his love of strange creatures, ghost and gothic horror stories with a deep literary sensibility to create genre films uniquely his own. In 1993 he released his first horror movie Cronos, followed up by another horror film, Mimic, which was unsuccessful. Based on the popular Marvel comic series, he directed Blade Two and Hellboy. In 2007, he received his first oscar nomination, for writing the screenplay for Pan's Labyrinth. Guillermo has made many other good movies. The major characters starts with Ofelia/Princess Moanna, a child who comes to believe she is the reincarnation of a fairy princess. Captain Vidal is deranged, a psychopath who is impossible to defend. Carmen is the mother of Ofelia and Vidal's new wife. Mercedes is the housekeeper. Dr. Ferreiro, a doctor in the service of Vidal who is also closeted republican and aids the rebels. Pedro is Mercede's brother and leader of the Republican cell in the area. The Faun, an ancient creature, he has been waiting in the labyrinth for the reincarnated princess to return. The Pale man is a monster with an appetite for children. Three Fairies, that are friends with the Faun. The minor characters are Garces and Serrano, both are Vidal's lieutenants. Queen and King of the Underworld. The Mandrake, a plant that dreamed of being human. Pan's Labyrinth takes place in two places, which is the real world and the fantasy world. In the real world, the story is set in Spain during 1944. It tells the story of a girl named Ofelia where her stepfather, the Falangist Captain Vidal, hunts the spanish Maquis, guerrillas who continued fighting the Franco regime in the region and as her pregnant mother grows ill. In the fantasy world, Ofelia enters through an overgrown labyrinth garden, where she meets the Faun. In a fairy tale, Princess Moanna whose father is the King of the Underworld, visits the human world, where the sunlight blinds her and erases her memory. She becomes very ill and eventually dies and the King believes that her spirit will return to the Underworld. In 1944, in the post civil war in Spain, rebels still fight in the mountains against the falangist troops. Ofelia travels with her pregnant and sick mother, Carmen Vidal to the country to meet and live with her stepfather, the cruel Captain Vidal, in an old mill. During the night, Ofelia meets a fairy and together they go to a pit in the center of a labyrinth where she meets a Faun that tells that she is a princess from a kingdom in the Underworld. He also tells that her father is waiting for her, but she needs to accomplish three tough and dangerous assignments first. If she fails, she will never prove herself to be the true princess and will never see her real father, the King, again. Meanwhile, she becomes friend of the housekeeper Mercedes, who is the sister of one of the rebels and actually is giving support to the group. Ofelia starts her first assignment, by having to retrieve a key that is inside the stomach of a giant frog. Ofelia goes into a tree looking for the frog and when she finds it, she throws in some magical rocks into the frog's mouth that made the frog explode and that way she gets the key. When Ofelia gets back home, her mother's condition gets worse and the Faun gives Ofelia a mandrake root, which cures the mother's illness. Ofelia then completes the second assignment, which is to retrieve a
