Nobody in my social circle will shut up about Pan's Labyrinth, and with good reason - I was genuinely expecting it to sink without a trace. At the end you can probably chalk this up to good marketing; as Dan points out elsewhere, most folk seemed to expect a sinister fairytale with lots of pretty imagery and a few good scares, and what they got was an examination of Spanish fascism. With Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, a somewhat soulless Narnia adaptation and soon Eragon and Dungeon Siege dancing across the screen and walloping us across the head with orchestras, it's good to know that people are still making fantasy films that mean something.

On the other hand, they always were. There's at least two films of recent years - Innocence by Lucile Hadzihalilovic and Terry Gilliam's Tideland - which plow incredibly similar furrows to Pan's Labyrinth. The formula seems simple - take a likeable young girl, put her in a bad situation, make it gradually nastier and scarier until she finally escapes her plight, and then use that situation as a means of making a point about something profound.

Innocence
By far the least visceral and grim of these three films is Innocence. There is a single, non-bloody death throughout the entire film, and yet at the same time everything - the acting, the lighting, the sounds and the colours - conspires to make you fear for the children.

Innocence is set in a bizarre girl's school and follows the career of several students. The girls all learn ballet alongside their usual subjects. They tell each other stories about terrible things that happen to disobedient girls. The eldest girls perform in small ballets for a mysterious, unseen audience every night. The youngest girls arrive at the school in coffins. The purpose of the school is frustratingly vague, but doesn't seem to be benign at all; I was worried towards the end that the girls were being groomed to be the playthings of rich child molesters, but the resolution of the film is nothing so straightforward or easy. The ending is genuinely ambiguous without, to my mind, being a cop-out: the graduating girls seem to be alright, they've survived, they've got through the troubles of school and they're ready for puberty, boys, and adulthood. But is it all worth losing your innocence for, or is adulthood an inherently corrupt and degenerate state? This film has lived inside my head ever since I saw it, and it won't leave.

Tideland
Terry Gilliam opens Tideland with an annoying appeal to the audience. He tells us that we'll either love or hate the movie (isn't that for us to decide?) and exhorts us to see the film through the eyes of a child. Er, thanks Terry, but the way you make a little girl the main character was all the prompting I needed.

The girl in question experiences horrors that are at least as harrowing as those in Pan's Labyrinth, if not more so. As with Pan, watching this one all the way through is at times difficult. For most of the film, she is at the mercy of selfish, self-absorbed, insane and/or mentally deficient adults; her mother dies of an overdose, as does her father once he drags her out to the countryside to escape. From that point on, a menacing neighbour and her idiot brother alternatingly torment and beguile our heroine, who is more concerned with the games she plays with her dolls' heads. There is only one character, who we meets at the end, who isn't wrapped up in their own obsessions.

In early Gilliam fantasy is nearly always a good thing - the hero of Time Bandits escapes his humdrum suburban existence through it, even though it kills his parents at the end, Sam Lowry's dreams in Brazil are his only escape from the secret police, and Baron Munchausen is resurrected by it. Tideland takes a more nuanced view. Our heroine spends a good deal of time playing pretend, and - most of the time - treats the whims of her adult malefactors as being a silly game. Frequently, this gets her out of trouble and allows her to survive the terrible things she is being subjected to. Yet just as escapism gives her a lifeline, it drives most of the adults in the film to their destruction. Drugs, obsessions, madness and delusion plague them. Their fantasies are not an escape mechanism to deal with the harsh realities; they are dodging their responsibilities, or trying to recapture relationships that are dead and buried, or are stuck repeating the traumas they suffered as a child. Finally, someone has made a fantasy film which acknowledges that there are far worse things than to have slightly boring parents who want you to do well in school.

Looking At Them Together
It's almost unfashionable to write fantasy that makes a meaningful point these days. In books and on film there's far more attention paid to worldbuilding than metaphor and allegory. This isn't surprising; evoking a sense of wonder through pretty scenery, flashy special effects and clever backstories plays to the genre's strengths, as well as selling books to the sort of people who argue about whether Ofelia really died in Pan's Labyrinth. There is a tendency in many corners of geekdom to approach every work of fiction as if it's an in-character document faithfully recounting an incident in a real world's history, which is alright for tours of lovingly-crafted worlds but less useful when you're looking at an allegorical parable. People tend not to quibble about the minutiae of Narnia because they understand that the point of the Narnia books is C.S. Lewis's Christian message. Pan's Labyrinth, Innocence, and Tideland, despite having differing messages, all live in the C.S. Lewis camp of fantasy, as opposed to the sub-Tolkien school, and should be treated as such. Being very similar in tone, if you like one you'll probably enjoy the others.