Another San Diego Comic Con has come and gone, bringing some of pop culture’s best to Hall H and beyond, with a smattering of worthy updates this year. Avengers: Doomsday still feels like a desperate Hail Mary. The announcements that Ryan Gosling will don Ghost Rider’s flaming skull (stealth Drive sequel?) and that the excellent David Jonsson is set to play T’Challa’s son in Ryan Coogler’s Black Panther 3 showcase why casting directors deserve an Oscar. We’re also getting another Air Bud and Coyote vs. Acme screened for attendees, making for a solid Con for all attendees.
Top-shelf moments for cinephiles aren’t always a comic-con staple, but this year had a stellar one. It’s been 20 years since the premiere of Guillermo del Toro’s masterful Pan’s Labyrinth, and the monster maestro reminded us why it was such a special film. Labyrinth will be released theatrically by Cineverse and Fathom on October 9, presented in both 3D and HDR versions. Del Toro promises “Absolutely no goddamn AI” was used in the film’s 3D reconstruction.
He noted that he and Cineverse are paying for the 3D conversion, and del Toro insisted that human artists make the changes. He said:
“What we’re protecting is the beauty and the redeeming power of art… it’s about [how] we’re protecting a lineage of art. If we cut a generation of people from learning their craft, you’re cutting the rest of the history of that medium away from them.”
He acknowledged that a human-led process takes longer, but details how James Cameron advised him to take the time the process needs. “If you take less than 300 days, I’ll kill you,” Cameron said. As del Toro summarizes, “When you convert to 3D, here’s the two ways you can do it: quick, or you can do it good, and I chose good.”
To commemorate the rerelease (timed to the auteur’s birthday, no less!), Cineverse pulled out all the stops, complete with roundtables, a Hall H panel, and an after-party debuting key scenes of the new release. Among the scenes screened in gorgeous 3D are Ofelia’s first encounter with the otherworldly Faun, and a harrowing scene with the infamous Pale Man (both creatures performed by Doug Jones). In both scenes, the 3D added beautifully set-apart layers, giving greater depth to the scene. (It didn’t hurt that we viewed the 3D scenes through 3D goggles shaped like the Pale Man’s hands).
In the roundtable interviews, Doug Jones described his process for capturing such distinctive creatures for the film:
“You have a sit-down with Guillermo del Toro before a movie starts filming, you get notes from him, and he also trusts my instincts. God bless him for that, ’cause they’re not always right… I don’t know, but he seems to think so. So he’ll give me a couple of bullet points. Like for the Faun character, he wanted me to study the hind quarter of barn animals, so look at the back of a cow and a goat and see how their hooves meet the ground… Pale Man, when I came to that scene, I went into it being floppy and disjointed. He said, ‘Dougie, no, give me George Romero zombie.’ I tightened it up, and I made it more stiff. He’s been asleep for a long time, of course. Collaboration is everything with Guillermo del Toro, and I love that he trusts us actors with what we bring to the table.”
Director of Photography Guillermo Navarro (who won an Oscar for his work on the film) discussed the secret to making the ever-popular Pale Man so memorably frightening: “You see, a horror movie would have been dark, sketchy,” he explains, “and this is a feast of color, the banquet, so that those grapes… you want to eat them, all those things. It’s living the experience to her, so it’s her that is navigating, and then you’re seeing it how she sees it.” Navarro went on to discuss how del Toro’s filmmaking instincts were unique relative to the Hollywood standard. “It’s actually the opposite way of how another filmmaker would have done it. This is like a luxury suite, right? With a fire behind him, all the elements. And then we used elements of the presentation of the Pale Man with the captain later.”
At the Hall H panel, del Toro explained that subtle changes made in the process of conversion will enhance the story. Like Navarro’s choices that play with the distinction between the natural and supernatural worlds, these distinctions will be amplified. “I think we can make it so that it is expressively powerful, so the real world is a little flatter, and the fantasy world has a huge depth,” he explained. “So thematically it will add to the movie. I was honestly not expecting how it was going to affect me seeing it. It’s incredible.”
Detailing some of the choices made, del Toro added, “I think that we always color-coded and shade-coded the real world as cold, straight lines, and the light is a lot more cold, and then the fantasy world has warmth, and uterine colors, and it has rounded shapes. Well, this adds to that.”
The Pan’s Labyrinth re-release is set for October 9, in both HDR and 4K 3D versions, from Cineverse.
Jeff Ewing is a documentary filmmaker, journalist, and critic in Los Angeles. He has bylines in Forbes, Collider, Gold Derby, Inverse, The Playlist, That Hollywood Show, and elsewhere, and is an RT-certified critic and Critics Choice member. His latest film is a documentary about the studios and artists keeping stop-motion animation alive in our increasingly digital age.
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