The Bizarre Worlds Of Guillermo del Toro

Children in films, as in literature, often occupy the ‘innocent but spunky’ position. They can be overzealous, annoying, little adults that are either smarter than their elders, or carbon copies of them. To do children well in a serious (read: non-kiddie) film has been a challenge for filmmakers. In many of his films, Guillermo del Toro’s project is the exposure of the childish world of make-believe as a real and emotionally complex and disturbing mirror image of the adult world.

In films like Pan’s Labyrinth and The Devil’s Backbone, the children must cope with an adult world they do not understand. But they do understand danger and violence – faced with the depradations of fascism and war, they engage in complex games, interacting with universes at once real and imaginary. Children are more capable of relating to the magical, spiritual and supernatural worlds, recognizing the wonder of life but also the violence of it. As del Toro blurs the line between fantasy and reality, so too does he combine the experience of the children with the belligerent violence and dangers of the adult world.

Guillermo del Toro’s children protagonists (and antagonists) are far from mere symbols or products of the adult world. They are fully fledged characters, played by excellent child actors. While his use of child actors has declined somewhat in recent years, a mere look back at The Devil’s Backbone, Pan’s Labyrinth, Cronos, and the films he wrote or produced including The Orphanage and Don’t Be Afraid Of The Dark, bears out how attached his films are to representing the underrepresented.  The children are not smarter, but wiser than the adults – affected by the adult world, they nonetheless question it, play with it, try to manipulate it in order to better understand their fates.  His films draw out what it means to be a child faced with dreadful, frightening circumstances – war, fascism, disease, the death of loved ones, the cruelty of bullies etc.

The childish world is a mirror of the adult world, reflecting it back in stark and often brutal colors.  In The Devil’s Backbone, mistrust piles upon mistrust, as the besieged wartime orphanage parallels the paranoiac world without.  A murdered child becomes a vengeful spirit, the parallel to a nation that has been corrupted, its innocence sacrificed to a world of bullies.  The child who pushes another into a well becomes the fascist who wants to rule the nation.