The importance of Guillermo del Toro’s work goes far deeper than whether or not he makes a mint at the box office – which, by and large, he does not.  More’s the pity. His films address with complexity and intelligence the supernatural world, proposing a dialectic between fantasy and reality and a symbiotic relationship in which one world affects the other. Pan’s Labyrinth, The Devil’s Backbone, Cronos, the Hellboy franchise, and Blade II, all address the notion of a magical world existing in tandem with our reality.
Del Toro’s films presuppose that what we see on the surface of the world is not all there is – that the supernatural not only exists, but affects us, lives with us and within us. His films challenge the very notion that there is a single reality. In this he’s working in a magical realist tradition – in its most simplistic form, the concept that the world of magic exists within the so-called ‘real world’ – very much in keeping with Southern American and Spanish roots.
The interplay between fantasy and reality is most sharply delineated in Pan’s Labyrinth. Set following the Spanish Civil War at the rise of Franco’s Spain, the film is about a young girl Ofelia, her fascist stepfather, a Captain, and her ill mother.  Ofelia eventually uncovers a fantasy world buried in her backyard – guided by a Faun, she must undertake tasks in order to save her mother, her little brother and restore herself to her ‘rightful place’ as Princess Moanna of the underworld.
Pan’s Labyrinth provides fantastical explanations for the most mundane events. One of Ofelia’s tasks is to retrieve a dagger from the ‘Pale Man’, who lives within the walls of the house. The notion that it is a child-eating monster who makes the creaking noises in a house late at night is both terrifying and beautifully in keeping with magical realist thematics.
The entire film is a fairytale – an interaction between the ‘real’ world of totalitarian violence represented by the belligerent Captain, and the equally dangerous magical world of the trickster Faun. Occurrences within the real world are paralleled in the magical world – as the violence between the rebels and the Captain increases, so too is the magical world disrupted. Ofelia’s tasks becoming more dangerous, her failure more costly, and the manipulation of the Faun more apparent. The danger of trusting authority, Ofelia’s rebellion against both the rules of magic and the rules of reality, and her final triumph, create a complicated interplay of fantasy and reality in which what is ‘real’ becomes a non-issue – it’s all real.
