Product Description

Following a bloody civil war, young Ofelia enters a world of unimaginable cruelty when she moves in with her new stepfather, a tyrannical military officer. Armed with only her imagination, Ofelia discovers a mysterious labyrinth and meets a faun who sets her on a path to saving herself and her ailing mother. But soon, the lines between fantasy and reality begin to blur, and before Ofelia can turn back, she finds herself at the center of a ferocious battle between good and evil.

DVD Features:
Audio Commentary
Theatrical Trailer

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #500 in DVD
• Brand: Warner Brothers
• Released on: 2007-05-15
• Rating: R (Restricted)
• Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
• Formats: AC-3, Closed-captioned, Color, Dolby, DTS Surround Sound, DVD-Video, Subtitled, Widescreen, NTSC
• Original language: Spanish
• Subtitled in: English, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Dimensions: .25 pounds
• Running time: 119 minutes

Amazon.com
Inspired by the Brothers Grimm, Jorge Luis Borges, and Guillermo del Toro's own unlimited imagination, Pan's Labyrinth is a fairytale for adults. Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) may only be 12, but the worlds she inhabits, both above and below ground, are dark as anything del Toro has conjured. Set in rural Spain, circa 1944, Ofelia and her widowed mother, Carmen (Ariadna Gil, Belle Epoque), have just moved into an abandoned mill with Carmen's new husband, Captain Vidal (Sergi López, With a Friend like Harry). Carmen is pregnant with his son. Other than her sickly mother and kindly housekeeper Mercedes (Maribel Verdú, Y Tu Mamá También), the dreamy Ofelia is on her own. Vidal, an exceedingly cruel man, couldn't be bothered. He has informers to torture. Ofelia soon finds that an entire universe exists below the mill. Her guide is the persuasive Faun (Doug Jones, Mimic). As her mother grows weaker, Ofelia spends more and more time in the satyr's labyrinth. He offers to help her out of her predicament if she'll complete three treacherous tasks. Ofelia is willing to try, but does this alternate reality really exist or is it all in her head? Del Toro leaves that up to the viewer to decide in a beautiful, yet brutal twin to The Devil's Backbone, which was also haunted by the ghost of Franco. Though it lacks the humor of Hellboy, Pan's Labyrinth represents Guillermo Del Toro at the top of his considerable game. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Customer Reviews

Interesting
If you don't like reading don't get this movie. It was a good movie. Sad but good.

A fairy tale for adults or children?
Visually stunning. However, this film suffers from an identity crisis. It is a fairy tale. A real Grimm's Brother's tale--not some Disneyfied feel good animated adventure. Like the Grimm's original tales, it is full of darkness, shadows and things that go bump in the night. But also, it is a film full of the wonder of being a child.

Unlike most fairy tales, it lacks a moral or lesson; and the film is so full of graphic violence and blood shed, no adult in their right mind would take their kid to see it. And there you have this film's real failing. It doesn't know who its audience is. If the blood and violence had been toned down a bit and it's message more clearly defined it could have easily been one of the greatest children's fairy tales of all time.

Perhaps Del Toro feels people wouldn't take his work seriously if he made a children's film. And so he brings in the Nazi's and politics and all sorts of adult rubbish, splashes them all over his film and says "hey, it's ok for you to watch it. It's an adult fairy tale now." And, in this he almost succeeds.

Underneath the muck and filth of the adult world that surrounds her, the innocent and fantastic imaginings of a young girl remind us once again what it is like to be a child again. But these moments are few and fleeting, flashes of something greater in a film soiled by the ordinary. It comes so close at times, it makes me wonder whether it is just a fluke, or if Del Toro just failed miserably at bringing his latest work out of the fog of budgets, deadlines, and Hollywood profiteering.

However you look at it, this film is less then the sum of its parts. However, some parts are worth watching just for themselves. The Fawn for instance is simply . . . well, amazing. In an industry drowning in a sea of computer graphics, this simple earthy and real looking creation is just breathtaking. When I saw the trailer for the film, this was what drew me to it. Also, the fairy tale itself, following the classical framework of tales hundreds of years old is also, ironically, refreshing.

For the eyes, a thumbs up. For the collection, a thumbs down.

del toro did it a+++++++++
anybody that gave pan's labyrinth a score of 3,2, especialy 1,Del Toro presents one dazzling visual spectacle after another, whether it be the Pale Man with his eyes set into his palms, the grisly surgery Vidal performs on himself, a dead tree that resembles at once a demonic horn and a womb, or a hacienda filled with gothic nooks and secrets. Francisco Goya, no stranger to images of violence and grotesquerie and the horrific, would approve.