Guanajuato, Gto., January 3, 2016.- Childhood, imagination, violence and disenchantment are some of the topics the researcher of the Division of Social Sciences and Humanities (DCSyH), Dr. Rogelio Castro Rocha, explores in his work "The fantastic and sinister in Guillermo del Toro."

In a book edited by the University of Guanajuato (UG), the literature professor reflects on two films of the Mexican filmmaker, "El espinazo del diablo" (2001) and "Pan's Labyrinth" (2006), where he contrasts the presence of the fantastic and sinister, genders that are intertwined by the topic of childhood.

According the scholar, in both movies the main characters are children that unravel between the world of the Spanish Civil War and a parallel world ruled by own and fantastic laws, counterpoising the limits between the normal and abnormal, between the regular and the extraordinary.

While the extraordinary is perceived by the main characters in the form of fantastic (ghosts, pans, mythical labyrinths), the sinister manifests by the presence of war, "for the violence and cruelty suggested or shown directly, and why there are mysteries that veil, causing anguish when they suddenly and terribly interrupt."

He added that in these works, the child characters are possessed of everything, almost destined to oblivion, however, "they preserve that intimate space of dreaming where they can imagine and shelter their innocence in front desolation. It is not about a physical place but internal, of the sensitive, of the imagination.

In both movies, mentioned the researcher, we can see this confrontation between the childish world and the adult view, while the first are featured by ingenuity and hope, and the others with disenchantment and cruelty, all that framed by the fantastic and sinister.

According Dr. Rogelio Castro Rocha, this is one of the most outstanding points of Guillermo del Toro's work, since it contrasts the fantastic and the sinister as a borderline that when it is passed by the characters, from its own perspectives, open the possibility to question on the form to be and experiment the world, as well as it allows to enrich the vision of the world, despite the difficulties they go through.