Review of Pan’s Labyrinth Special Edition DVD
Big fans of Pan’s Labyrinth, read on. The Special Edition DVD which came out a few weeks ago is well worth the extra bucks. It’s chock full of goodies and features, such as the featurette “Pan and the Faeries”, a very thorough look at the making of the monsters and the faeries in the film. Guillermo Del Toro gives tons of camera time and interviews with himself featured, and listening to his thick latin accent explain all the philosophical concepts of this film makes watching it again even better.
The featurettes have a feature named “The Power of Myth”, where Del Toro explains his life long fascination with fairy tales and how he has chosen to interpret it through his film. Another extremely interesting one is called “Pan and the Faeries”, where we get a glimpse into everything about the monsters in the film, even the makeup and prosthetic process used for the amazingly well constructed “Faun” and the monster named “The Pale Man”. Del Toro says of movie monsters, “The worst thing an effects house can do, or a director can do in creating a movie, is just to reference other movies.” Well that is the last thing Del Toro has done. Every monster has been created over and over and conceptually reshaped to be as original as possible.
The Director’s Notebook is absolutely gorgeous. The notes and sketches are Del Toro’s actual notebooks, and as you flip through it, certain pages allow you to open up a mini feature where Del Toro explains the growth of that particular idea into how it became the final one for the film. While this is a very original film, Del Toro explains many of the age old themes that run through his film that also run through many fairy tales, like the power of imagery and emotional themese and how the two play off eacother . This is not the only section to explain it since it is after all, a topic Del Toro is in love with.Further on you get to see storyboards with shot by shot comparisons to the actual movie and Del Toro with a fake green fairy showing where the special effects green fairy is meant to fly around.
One of the most charming special features is a three director interview on “The Charlie Rose Show” with Director Alphonso Cuaron(“Y Tu Mama Tambien”, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”), Guillermo Del Toro(“Cronos”, “Hellboy”, “Pan’s Labyrinth”) and Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu(“Amores Perros”, “21 Grams”). Most people probably won’t know that these three directors have been friends for as long as a decade and call eachother for advice and support.
Comic book fans, don’t think you were left out. There is an entire section where some of the monsters and other moments of the film are turned into a DVD comic. The coolest looking one is definitely “The Pale Man”, where it talks about how he became the creature he is and I quote the white word box “His only sustenance was the blood of innocents.”