In response to Maul2's original query:

Okay, here it is, the first time I lay myself open to being wrong on the interwebs in my writing. How critical I am of a story seems to depend on how seriously a movie takes itself; Pan’s Labyrinth was a serious Film with a capital F, with no puppets that looked like foam balls with slits for mouths or googly eyes singing wacky songs that would appeal to small children. It did, however, have graphic violence making some edgy statement about how mean fascists were during the 40’s. That is seriously the only coherent message I can get from this obviously-not-child oriented-movie.

I place Labyrinth on the same level that I do Muppet Treasure Island. You want to poke holes in those stories, I’m not going to stop you. I will still dance around my mother's living room with my little brother, who is the most serious 21 year old astrophysics major I have ever known, singing “Dance Magic, Dance,” and sit in unabashed wonder of various prop/puppet design and David Bowie’s mullet/package/contact juggling.

Aside: Yes, I know that’s actually Michael Moschen inelegantly standing behind David Bowie as though in a middle school talent show, I still learned to contact juggle because of that movie. I also quote Muppet Treasure Island on an almost daily basis. Still feelin’ pretty cool.

I agree, through some combination of an 80’s synth pop soundtrack/ musical landscape and a blatantly cartoon ensemble, the stakes never seem that high in Labyrinth. This movie suffers in part from what I call “The Goonie Phenomena”; if you saw Goonies before the age of 10 or so it has a special place in your heart and makes you (like me) squeal and clap at appropriate moments. If not, you don’t understand why other people seem to care so goddamn much. It has more to do with emotional bond one created when they first watched the film. I don’t care for “Legend,” but I can see where you could be very fond of it, having grown up with it, I didn’t see it until college.   

In defense of the Labyrinth screenplay, Sarah goes through exactly the kind of transformation I believe is necessary to make a story worth watching. In the beginning she is an inexcusably whiny bitch, she literally throws herself down on her bed, sobbing “I hate you” into her pillow, referencing her rather reasonable seeming step-mother, who wants her to babysit her burden of an infant half-brother, cutting into her valuable reciting poetry in the park and putting on lipstick time. I found that laughably over-dramatic even at the height of my spoiled upper-middle-class over-dramatic whitegirlness.       

She comes to understand the gravity of what she has done, and at first it is about whether or not she’s gong to get in trouble, but it becomes more than that...she is a better person, she redeems herself, she is happy to see her intact baby brother.

I’m not saying it’s not formulaic, I’m saying it’s a kid’s movie that for some reason graphically showcases some spandex-clad glam rock genitalia. Sarah has an arc, while Pan's Ofelia does not. Sarah could live forever as a queen at mulleted David Bowie’s contact juggling side, but she goes through a bunch of shit, and saves the baby she that she actively despised and wished kidnapped and gone forever, beginning this whole kerfuffle with her self-centered bullshit. (And it makes sense that if some magic poem made it so that he could come and take the baby, some magic poem should make it so he had no power over her. Through-lines and consistency are neat.)

Meanwhile, Pan’s Labyrinth demonstrates no character arc, nobody does anything they wouldn’t have done in the beginning by the end. Except the Fawn, who decides that her negligence and getting his friends killed did not prove, as he said it would, that she had been tainted from too much exposure to the mortal realm. Ofelia did not learn a fucking thing, other than “if I fail a trial through shear carelessness, I’ll get a second chance...oh, and the step-father that was mean to me in the beginning is even meaner now that I’m an orphan. Grand."