Four Featurettes
The Pan's Labyrinth New Line Two-Disc Platinum Series DVD set contains four featurettes with a combined run time of about 49 minutes. These are mostly in English, with a few minutes in Spanish.
The best of these is the 14-minute "Power of Myth," in which del Toro puts his character Ofelia in the tradition of Lewis Carroll's Alice, L. Frank Baum's Dorothy and the Grimm brothers' Little Red Riding-Hood. He cites Bruno Bettelheim as saying that fairy tales exteriorize conflicts and matters that are intrinsically human and interior.
The half-hour "Pan and the Fairies" is an entertaining featurette on the film's creatures. It shows how the faun and the Pale Man were done, and we get to hear from Doug Jones, who played both characters. We learn that the Pale Man eating the fairies is a reference to "Saturn Devouring His Son," Goya's best-known Black Painting.
In the four-minute "The Color and the Shape," del Toro tells how he used grays and muted blues and greens for the movie's real world, while the magical world is golden and red. The shapes of the real world are created by straight lines, while in the magical world they're irregular and curved.
Finally, there's five minutes on "The Lullaby," which formed the central motif for the movie's Oscar-nominated score. The music in the film is quite good, but hearing the same few bars from the lullaby so often while going through the DVD becomes tedious.
Director's Notebook and Charlie Rose
The DVD option "Director's Notebook" leads to bonus materials which illuminate how del Toro makes a movie. In the best of these we get a look at the director's notes and sketches, which includes 15 minutes of video. Knowing he needed an ogre, del Toro first came up with the Nerve Ghost, then the Wooden Man (a puppet with a set of drawers), but he rejected these in favor of the Pale Man. He says the flat face of that character was inspired by the manta ray. Del Toro also explains how he designed violence to have an emotional impact and to be off-putting.
Cinephiles will enjoy the 49-minute Charlie Rose Show, in which the host has a lively roundtable discussion with the three best-known contemporary Mexican-born filmmakers: del Toro, Alfonso Cuarón (Children of Men) and Alejandro Gonzáles Iñárritu (Babel). The conversation ranges over all the movies of all three directors, but del Toro does make an interesting comment relevant to the ending of Pan's Labyrinth when he quotes Kierkegaard as saying, "The tyrant's reign ends when he dies, and the martyr's reign begins when he dies."
A Worthwhile Audio Commentary by the Writer-Director
The Pan's Labyrinth DVD provides a feature-length English-language audio commentary by del Toro. There is considerable redundancy with the information covered elsewhere on the DVD, but the intellectual del Toro disseminates such a huge quantity of varied material that he is worth listening to anyway. He insists Pan's Labyrinth is about "choice and disobedience." He points out several places where he used historical incidents from the Spanish civil war in the film. He employed lots of wipes in the movie because they are reminiscent of book pages being turned. He names many of his influences, including Dickens' David Copperfield, Hans Christian Andersen's "Little Match Girl," Pink Floyd's The Wall, the symbolists and the Pre-Raphaelites. And he characterizes Pan's Labyrinth as a "hopelessly melancholy romantic movie."
DVD Details
Below I've listed the details for the New Line Two-Disc Platinum Series DVD set containing Pan's Labyrinth.
Release Date: May 15, 2007
Number of Discs: 2
Widescreen (1.85:1), Color
Feature Film Run Time: 1 hour 59 minutes
MPAA Rating: R for Graphic Violence and Some Language
Spanish DTS-ES 6.1 Discrete
Spanish Dolby Digital 5.1 EX Surround Sound
Spanish Stereo Surround Sound
English Subtitles
Spanish Subtitles
Feature Audio Commentary by Director Guillermo del Toro
Director's Prologue (25 seconds)
Poster Art
Teaser Trailer
Theatrical Trailer
TV Spots (7)
Featurette: The Power of Myth (14 minutes)
Featurette: Pan and the Fairies (30 minutes)
Featurette: The Color and the Shape (4 minutes)
Featurette: The Lullaby (2 segments, total run time 5 minutes)
Del Toro's Notes and Sketches (6 segments, total run time 15 minutes)
Storyboard/Thumbnail Compares (4 sequences)
VFXPlate Compare: Del Toro and the Green Fairy
Galleries (Creature Design and Production)
The Charlie Rose Show With 3 Mexican-Born Directors (49 minutes)
DVD Comics (Back Stories of Magical Creatures)
DVD ROM/Online Features
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