Guillermo Del Toro - Analyse the Way the Director Uses Three Distinctive Elements of Film Language to Communicate Meaning to the Audience

Guillermo Del Toro

Task 1: Analyse the way the director uses three distinctive elements of film language to communicate meaning to the audience.

Costume/makeup:

Director, Guillermo Del Toro focuses on costume in his films; in pan’s labyrinth we see this with the faun who sends Ophelia on her journeys. The first scene we see him is when Ophelia goes into the labyrinth at night, he looks old, wise and mythological. When the audience see’s the faun, they see an animalistic creature with an element of danger to him, but they also know he is friendly. The faun’s hunchback and wrinkles on his face show his age and wisdom; from this the audience knows that the faun is an important key to the fantasy side of the story, because he is old the audience will suspect he knows a lot and holds wisdom to pass on to Ophelia. He has spirally inscriptions in his face similar to cave paintings on a wall; this shows that he is mythological; when the audience sees him they know that he is ancient and that he is part of the labyrinth and its mystical tale. The faun’s nose is very rectangular, similar to that of a cat or dog; this feature makes the faun look friendly and approachable, when the audience see’s the rectangular shape they subconsciously think of a cat or dog and recognise the faun as friendly. One last point, the fauns teeth are very sharp and scary looking especially to a child (Ophelia), they symbolise Ophelia’s fear of her new found fantasy world, although the faun is friendly and good we still get bad vibes from his teeth, humans have an ancient way of figuring out if an animal is dangerous, animals with sharp teeth tend to be more dangerous than others.

Another film by Guillermo Del Toro that has a lot of costume use is Hellboy 2: The golden army, Hellboy and his buddies Abe the fish guy, Krauss spelt with an SS because he’s German, and Liz who can set herself on fire all have unique costume for their character. However the most distinctive to me was Hellboy himself. A memorable scene that displayed Hellboy’s costume well is when he is preparing to fight the forest Elementor, we see him in full view of the camera as he grabs weapons and the “big baby”. Hellboy’s most obvious costume feature is that his entire body is red, this is to reinforce the idea that he is from hell or is a devil and to give an element of danger to him. When the mostly Christian audience of North America see’s Hellboy they are suspicious and maybe even frightened of him because devils have always been an enemy in the Christian faith, however as he displays his good deeds on the screen this perception that he is evil is changed. Hellboy knows that people see him as evil, another distinctive element to his costume are his horns, however he tries to file them down to make himself look more normal. Hellboy’s filed down horns