Pan's Labyrinth (2006, Sp./Mex./US) (aka El Laberinto del Fauno)

In Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro's wondrously imaginative World War II era fantasy film set in Northern Spain during fascist Franco's repressive regime in the mid-1940s, a time of civil war - an inventive, multi-level world of war-time horror within an adult legend:

• the prologue (following a zoom shot into the eye of a bloodied, dying young girl): one day, Princess Moana (Ivana Baquero), daughter of the King of the Underground Realm, escaped up to the human world (of blue skies, soft breezes and sunshine) where she was blinded by sunlight and her memory was erased; she became ill and eventually died; her King-father believed that her long-lost soul would eventually return by the next full moon, perhaps in another body, place, or time; he would wait for her

Prologue

• in the opening, pre-pubescent 11 year-old orphaned heroine Ofelia (also Ivana Baquero) accompanied her sickly pregnant mother Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to meet up with her brutally sadistic and malevolent new stepfather Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez) in a small remote Spanish district, with headquarters in an abandoned mill

Ofelia with Praying Mantis or Stick-Bug Insect-Fairy

• young Ofelia sought refuge in an imaginary escapist world of storybooks; Ofelia's mother had skeptically warned: "Fairy tales? You're a bit too old to be filling your head with such nonsense"; she first communicated with a stick bug-praying mantis insect (CGI) that she believed was a fairy

Captain Vidal (Sergi Lopez)

House Servant Mercedes (Maribel Verdu)

The Resistance Rebels in the Forest

• to illustrate the tyranny and brutishness of the oppressively evil and vain Captain - he personally murdered two innocent rabbit-hunting farmers (a father and son, by a face-stabbing and point-blank gunshot), then blithely dismissed his wrongdoing by having his chief house-keeping servant Mercedes (Maribel Verdu), who was secretly sympathizing with and aiding the Spanish Maquis rebels (led by her brother Pedro (Roger Casamajor)), prepare a stew with the rabbit meat
• in her new forest home filled with fairies, she met a menacing, ominous, tall, goat-headed forest faun named Pan (Doug Jones) with curled horns - located at the center of a maze-like garden labyrinth; when the enigmatic Pan identified Ofelia as the reincarnated Princess Moana, she was challenged to a quest - three risky and daunting tasks to prove herself and reunite her with the underground realm and her true father: (1) retrieve a golden key vomited from the belly of a monstrous toad living inside a tree, and (2) retrieve a golden dagger from behind a small rock door (unlocked by the key) in the lair of the monstrous, vile, humanoid, devouring and child-eating, faceless Pale Man (also Jones) with pale elastic skin
• during her scary confrontation in the Pale Man's lair, after retrieving the dagger, the monstrous creature was accidentally awakened from his slumber at a banquet table when Ofelia was disobedient and stole and ate two grapes - he took his detached eyeballs from the table in front of him, and placed them into eye sockets in the palm of his two claw-like stigmatic hands, to enable him to see so that he could pursue and eat Ofelia (drawings of him eating children decorated the banquet hall's walls), after he had consumed two of the fairies
• the unexpected death of Ofelia at the hands of her own adoptive step father Captain Vidal - her murder occurred as she fulfilled the third of three challenging tests given to her by Pan to prove that she was the true Princess of the underworld realm; when she brought her newborn brother (her remarried mother died in childbirth) to the center of the labyrinth maze and presented him to Pan, she was told that there was only one "final task" ("The portal will only open if we offer the blood of an innocent") - she interpreted that the 'innocent' was her baby brother and she refused to take Pan's dagger and stab the baby ("My brother stays with me"); the pursuing Captain Vidal (who had earlier been stabbed and seriously bloodied by Mercedes) came up behind Ofelia and demanded the child; she was shot in the stomach when she objected - she fulfilled the test however, when the spilled blood from her hand opened a portal to the underworld kingdom; after the Captain left the labyrinth, he was forced to turn over the child to Mercedes before he was shot to death by the victorious rebels

Captain Vidal's Murder of Ofelia (Death of an "Innocent") and Her Return to the Underground Realm

• in the final sequence, Ofelia died in the labyrinth and was transported to the Underground Realm, where she was seen dressed in gold joining her dead mother Carmen/Queen and actual father, the underworld King (Federico Luppi), in the land of the fairies' throne room - she was applauded as the long-lost Princess Moana ("Your Highness"), whose soul had returned; she was invited to sit next to her father and rule at his side; she died believing that she had successfully completed the three tasks and achieved immortality
• Pan spoke the last lines of the film, in voice-over: ("And it is said that the Princess returned to her father's kingdom. That she reigned there with justice and a kind heart for many centuries. That she was loved by her people. And that she left behind small traces of her time on Earth, visible only to those who know where to look")