GITS Script Reading and Analysis Series: “Pan’s Labyrinth″ — Characters

Welcome to Week 6 of the GITS Script Reading & Analysis series. This week we will be analyzing the screenplay for Pan’s Labyrinth (written by Guillermo del Toro), your selection for the Fantasy genre. If you haven’t had a chance to read the script yet, you can go here.

As background, here are some thoughts from an interview with del Toro about the original concept of the movie:

“Originally the idea was that it was a married couple and the wife was pregnant. She fell in love with the faun in the labyrinth, and the husband was so straight. The faun said to her, ‘If you give me your child and you trust me with killing your child, you will find him and I, both, on the other side, and the labyrinth will flourish again,’ and she made that leap of faith. It was a shocking tale and it started changing. It was totally different than this one. But movies are like that, and stories are like that. They change on you.

I don’t know exactly when it happened but I know that, in post-production on Hellboy over a chicken dinner at Alfonso [Cuaron’s] house — he was post-producing Harry Potter’ — I said, ‘Well, after dinner, I’ll tell you the movie I want to make,’ and I told him this movie, start to finish, exactly as it was made. At that point, I had made the decision. I believe it happened over the course of a couple of days.”

Let’s continue our analysis of the script Pan’s Labyrinth today by considering the characters in the story. Here is a list of most of them in order of appearance in the script:

Ofeila

Carmen

Vidal

Mercedes

Doctor

Stick Insect/Green Fairy

Faun

Capitan

Toad

Pale Man

Stutter

Pedro

What role does each primary character play? How are they tied to Ofelia’s story? And if you wish, consider what archetypes they may represent:

Protagonist: The lead character, the character through whose perspective the story is told, the character who typically goes through the most significant metamorphosis.

Nemesis: Provides opposition to the Protagonist, often represents the Protagonist’s shadow, their dark impulses, tied somehow to the Protagonist’s goal.

Attractor: Characters who are most intimately tied to the Protagonist’s emotional development, often a love interest, Heart.

Mentor: Characters who are most intimately tied to the Protagonist’s intellectual development, wisdom, Head.

Trickster: Characters who test the Protagonist, switching allegiance from ally to enemy, enemy to ally, intentionally or not helping to prepare the Protagonist for their Final Struggle.

See you in comments!

For Day 1 of our analysis of Pan’s Labyrinth, go here.

For Day 2 focusing on structure, go here.

[Remember next week (10/16–10/20), we will be reading Blade Runner, your choice for the Science Fiction genre. You may access the 1981–05–15 version of the script here.]

NOTE: THIS SERIES AND THE USE OF SCRIPTS IS STRICTLY FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES!

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