El Laberinto Del Fauno

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El Laberinto del Fauno is a beautiful yet chilling tale set in rural Spain. Guillermo del Toro conveys many different themes that are displayed through the characters, one of his main themes is obedience, and disobedience. For me this was extremely important to the story as it shows the character’s strengths and weaknesses under strict authority. In this essay I am going to develop these ideas, and show why del Toro chose to express these strengths and weaknesses in these particular characters. In 2006 Mexican film maker, Guillermo del Toro, wrote and produced a dark fantasy and chilling story set in 1944 rural spain, five years after the Spanish civil war. The story follows the imagination of Ofelia, a young girl who is sent with her pregnant mother to go live with her new stepfather, Vidal, a vicious captain of the Spanish army. During the night she meets a fairy who she follows into the woods, this is where she meets the faun, who tells her that she is actually a princess of an underground realm and she must complete three awful tasks in order to prove that she is in fact a princess, with the risk that if she fails, she will never see her father again. The themes which Toro creates are very powering throughout the storyline; there is an undeniably strong religious theme even though this is not seen as a religious film. During Ofelia’s second task where she is told to go get a dagger from the Pale man’s lair, the faun strictly tells her not to eat any of the food on the table, however curiosity gets the better of her and in return the faun refuses to help her anymore, this mirrors the story of Adam and Eve. Also the existence of another world underground, one where there is no pain or suffering, yet each individual there is completely unsatisfied, this shows religious overtones. “It’s a matter of creating a fairy tale that is in favor of disobedience —
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