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Guillermo Del Toro's Film The Shape Of Water

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Guillermo del Toro recently won Golden Lion award at the Venice Film Festival for his latest film The Shape of Water - a great achievement in a career of this 52-year old Mexican filmmaker who, as a kid, only wanted to make monster films.

A cross between a creature feature and a fairy tale, The Shape of Water tells a story of a mute cleaning woman named Elisa (Sally Hawkins) who falls in love with a humanoid sea creature imprisoned in a science facility ran by the belligerent Colonel Strickland (Michael Shannon). Del Toro 's film is heavily indebted to a 1954 Universal monster film Creature from the Black Lagoon, where a creature like the one in The Shape of Water hunts down a group of scientists in the Amazon. In the Black Lagoon 's two sequels - Revenge of the Creature (1955) and The Creature Walks Among Us (1956) …show more content…

The film takes place in Spain in 1944 where fascist forces of General Francisco Franco have won the brutal civil war only five years ago. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) is a sensitive girl whose sickly mother (Ariadna Gil) just married brutal and selfish Captain Vidal (Sergi López). Ofelia discovers an old labyrinth garden where she meets Pan (again, Doug Jones) and undergoes a quest to gain immortality. Del Toro here deliberately muddles the easy dichotomy between prosaic reality and magical world of make-believe. Ofelia 's real-life story plays out like a Grimm fairy tale of abused children and wicked step-parents. Meanwhile, the world of the labyrinth is far from an escapist fantasy - it is full of dangers and real-life tragic consequences for Ofelia. But yet again, true monsters aren 't the ones who simply follow their nature but the low-ranking army officer of a burgeoning fascist police-state who uses his power to hurt and kill those even less powerful than him, even when he claims to care about. Pan 's Labyrinth is an unsettling, yet undoubtedly beautiful and heartfelt

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This is especially the case in Guillermo del Toro’s film Pan’s Labyrinth, which juxtaposes fairy tale elements with aspects of Franco era Spain to explore some of its realities in greater detail. By comparing the evils of Vidal and of Ofelia’s fantasy world Del Toro presents the atrocities of Franco era Spain’s Fascist leadership. By contrasting the shapes, colors, and cleanliness of the two worlds, he presented some of the more basic principles of the Fascist regime, and by placing symbolic objects throughout the film, Del Toro emphasizes their symbolic importance to Vidal and again to the Fascist regime. Even with all of these comparisons, however, it is still impossible to determine for a fact if Ofelia’s make believe world was real or

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Men, women, and children were caught in the crossfire and sometimes even deliberately murdered by both sides. del Toro does not sugarcoat the brutality of the Spanish Civil War as even the first image the audience is shown is of a dying and bloody child. Indeed, much of the violence in the movie is experienced by the young and innocent. In The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro, it is suggested that the violence in the movie “is commensurate with the brutality of certain fairy tales in their original form and also with a realist vision of the cruelty of war that uses the figure of the child to create greater empathy and affect the spectator”(Davies 192). While much of the cruelty in Pan’s Labyrinth is very graphic, it is the explicit nature of what is experienced by children that makes the movie hard to watch for some.

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Pan’s Labyrinth (2006), directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a gorgeously realised tale of fantasy and horror, set against the backdrop of post-Civil War Spain. The story follows a young girl, Ofelia, who travels to the countryside with her ill mother to live with her new stepfather, Vidal, a captain in Franco’s Fascist army. The film explores how Ofelia uses her imagination as a copying mechanism to deal with the monstrosities of her reality as well as to interpret the horrific events unfolding around her. Del Toro employs a number of cinematic devices including cinematography, sound and editing to effectively draw parallels between Ofelia’s reality and imagination, ultimately creating a powerful film that condemns the nature of Fascism.

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