Pan's Labyrinth directed by Guillermo del Toro Estudios Picasso, 2006, 119 min.

It is said that a long, long time ago, once upon a time, another time, not ours, there was a Princess who longed to live among the humans, among us and as one of us The familiarity of the incantation, its rhythm and repetition, gives us license finally to lay down the burdensome daily duties of disbelief and to drift, bewitched and dreaming, into that other magical realm — of bedtime stories and daydreams, fairy tales, and the make-believe of childhood — stories where our imaginations were strong enough to shape and transform the world with practically no help from our more reasonable selves, selves who were delighted to just let go and follow the river of the adventure. Perhaps you can just remember that particular feeling of magical existence when bed sheets became forts and dolls spoke and monsters waited in the dark — the whole breathing world of trees and secret hiding places and miraculous treasures discovered and well-kept. It is into this world that Guillermo del Toro inducts us in his latest film, El laberinto del fauno (glibly translated as “Pan's Labyrinth” — why the producers felt a need to identify the faun as a recognizable Greek demigod, only the harpies of distribution know). The film, released in 2006 and just out on DVD (well worth another viewing), juxtaposes the fairy tale dreaming of a young girl with the brutal fascistic regimes of Franco's Spain in 1944. Ophelia travels with her pregnant mother to the country to meet up with her new stepfather, Capitán Vidal, who is attempting to vanquish a band of anti-Franco rebel fighters. The stories of Ophelia and Vidal unfold in parallel, slowly and progressively contaminating one another until they become one at the center of the eponymous labyrinth, a portal between the “real” world of adults and the fantastical underworld of children that mirrors it. The film itself, of course, is just such a portal, with its yellow-brick-road invitation to cross over into