Ofelia's Last Fairy Tale Analysis

Ofelia’s Last Fairy Tale: A Dying Wish El Laberinto del Fauno is a film directed by and conceived from the mind of Guillermo del Toro. It is set in the events after the Spanish civil war in 1944 when rebels are still rejecting the Fascist regime. The tale starts with the journey of Ofelia and her mother Carmen. They are conversing about how Ofelia is taken by her fantasy books to which her mother says, “Aren’t you too old to be filling your head with such nonsense?”. This critique’s intent is to establish that Ofelia’s world of enchanted folks was a dying kid’s last attempt to spin a happy ending in her own fairy tale. The story of Princess Moanna and her labyrinth was Ofelia’s very own tale. She was familiar with the comfort brought upon by her fantasy books that in her final moments she sought after it one final time.

It must have brought her comfort when her father died and while they were suffering from the effects of a bloody war. She was subjected to the harsh cruelty of the reality forcing her to grow up but she sought after the books in order to maintain what little remained of her childlike innocence. She took the comfort offered by it because of wanting to escape her world much like the tale of Princess Moanna. Princess Moanna’s tale started with her escape from the Underground Realm. We are familiar with the negative connotation of hell, a place where eternal suffering was to be found. But in her story, the Underground Realm was described to be a place with no pain or lies. This is the description of a world Ofelia wants to escape to because she lives in a grim reality where those things are abundant. Ofelia was narrating what she wanted to have had in her life as she suffered through the pain of losing her father and seeing her mother wed a vile