i think its okay to start my analysis of guilermo del toros Pan labyrinth with a spoiler ophelia - the main character... she dies at the end i feel fine doing that because del toro does the exact same thing with his movie the first shot of pan`s labyrynth is the ending and it`s also the first way in which Del toro complicates that ending but before we get into that a few things about fairy-tales for most of us the authoritative source for fairy-tales is walt disney and that`s no accident disney set out to claim that authority when he made films like snow white, cinderella or sleeping beauty by adapting folk tales in the public domain and copywriting the adaptations still, because film was a relatively new media capturing tha authority he wanted required Disney to remain faithful to the original versions of these stories popularized by charles piero and brothers grimm he made the transition from print to cinema as smooth as possible for the audience even going so far as to begin his movies with the oppenning of a book Disney was smart his films are now regarded as classics and yet, by remaining so faithful to the stories 19-centure antecedents he inherited and furthered their 19th century morality a conservative, patriarchal value system in which the prince always comes to save the helpless heroine a value system that was antiquated even then in this way, disney limited the kinds of things a fairy-tale can do in Pan`s labyrinth guilermo del toro attempts to explode these limitations and he does so by recontextualising the stories instead of pulling from a single authoritative source del toro pulls from a huge number of sources giving non-precedence over the others and letting them all play against one another to create meaning the film tells the story of the little girl offelia and her mother Carmen as they go to live a hyper-fashist captain Vidall five years after the spanish civil war vidall is trying to snugg out the last remnants of rebellion in the mountains awaiting his childs birth by carmen while Ophelia becomes ensnared in a magical quest after a faun tells her she is the lost princess of an underground realm from here the story spins out into two paralles narratives the magical quest and the political drama crucially, neither of these narratives becomes reducable to the other del toro makes a point of this by entwaining them in ways, that makes any totalizing explanation problematic at the end of the film for exampe we get what seems to be a nail in the coffin for the magical quest vidall approachers ophelia speaking with the faun and when the camera cuts to his point of view the faun is not there it appears to be solid evidence for those who read ophelias quest as a coping mechanism for her sad life but, if we back up, we can see how del toro complicates that reading by remembering that vidall has just been drugged with a heavy dose of sleeping medication in other stories, drug induced gallucinations are used to explain a way why people see supernatural but in pans labyrinth it`s the opposite del toro uses the device to destabilize our trust in captain vidalls point of view