In the movie Pan’s Labyrinth the director Guillermo Del Toro composes his breathtaking shots with a clever use of lighting and with a meticulous attention to the mise-en-scene, emphasised by the use of a beautiful cinematography and a fantastic sound-score, in order to convey the real purpose of life through the development of Ophelia’s character and the use of profound symbolism and implicit meaning. In order to differentiate the egoistic world, represented by the Civil War’s atrocities and the General Vidal, from the spiritual and pure world, represented by the fairies and the faun, Ophelia has to pass successfully three proofs which will allow her to rediscover who she really is and reconcile herself with the soul and inner spirit, refusing the materialistic ego.
The first proof that Ophelia has to face is “the toad proof” in which she has to defeat a monster a and retrieve an important key. This scene has a multitude of implicit meanings proving that Ophelia is not afraid of the oppressing external world. For this reason she gets rid of her mother’s constricting dress and to pass the proof she is not scared to put herself in a lower position crawling under the tree. Important are the colours which are more saturated and brighter in the fantasy world and more neutral and darker in the real world. Right after she defeats the monsters she can finally stand up and from high angle shots the directors starts using lower angle shots to prove the superiority of Ophelia. Besides, the contrast in the
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Ophelia invite the audience to follow her in the journey of depuration and to analyse that the real self is who we really are and not who the oppressing society is imposing us to