Pan's Labyrinth is a dark movie both aesthetically and tonally. The main character, a young girl named Ofelia, is moved into, basically, an army compound when her mom marries and is having a baby with a super evil army officer guy and that's where the normalcy stops. A creepy ass "faun" (is what they call it) called Pan finds her and tells her she is a long lost princess who must complete all these different tasks in order to become immortal. This is the point where audiences have to decide for themselves whether or not Ofelia is imaging this whole scenario to escape the horror of her reality, or if her situation is legitimately happening. I think perceiving the situation either way can really alter the way an audience member thinks about this movie, and really decides if the ending is miserable or a revival.
Because this is a fantasy film with a lot of fantasy creatures, there were a lot of chances to just computer animate everything, and while they did use computer animation, it was tasteful. There was an appropriate mix of practical effects and CGI. There are two main fictional characters that constantly show up throughout the movie, Pan, and the faeries. Pan is all practical effect which is insane if you've ever seen how inhuman this thing looks, you would never think there is a human man in that suit. On the other hand, the faeries are CGI, and they show up within the first few minutes of the movie. Out of the two "monsters" Ofelia and the audience meets during her trials, one is CGI and one is practical effect. It's really interesting to watch the decisions they made between CGI and practical effects between creatures.
The tone of this movie is appropriately dark for the situation, but in my opinion, even the dark tone throughout the movie doesn't really prepare audiences for the frankly gruesome end. The movie gets a lot more gory towards the end. The upsetting outcomes to the not-so-ideal situations appropriately prepare audiences for the ultimately worse case scenario ending. If you've seen Mama or The Orphanage, the ending to Pan's Labyrinth is very reminiscent to those endings. It is a very Guillermo Del Toro ending.
In between the fantasy timeline, there is the side plot which makes up the whole situation Ofelia's in: a civil war type situation where her step-father is the head military guy. So in-between all these adventures Ofelia is having, there are these scenes of her step-father torturing people from the rebellion and people from the rebellion infiltrating the base. There is an amazing sub-plot of this war that is happening that actually takes a lot of opportunity to flesh out some of the side characters and uses this plot line to achieve a lot of character development. It's a really interesting way to bring things from Ofelia's plot into the war plot and create plot devices to further the plot. I really appreciated the tie back into real life after being bombarded with a ton of fantasy in such a short amount of time.
Everything in this movie is up to interpretation. Now, as the pessimist I am, I believed everything in this movie was just a figment of a tortured little girls imagination. Maybe she was crazy or super depressed at the army compound and created this fantasy world to escape the hellhole and also her asshat of a stepdad, but I believed that the fantasy elements of the movie was completely in Ofelia's head. Now, that leaves the ending to be a very depressing, miserable ending and there is no uplifting part of it. However, I really like discussing the events and the ending of this movie with people who think it all actually happened. I, for the most part, think everyone is crazy in Guillermo Del Toro movies; it's just a good rule to live by when watching his freaky ass movies. I really liked this movie regardless of the either miserable or uplifting ending; Guillermo Del Toro has yet to fail me.
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