10 Essential Movies Guillermo Del Toro Demands You See

8. Beauty And The Beast

While Disney cleaned up at the box office with their lushly colour-coded and smoothly animated adaptation of Beauty And The Beast, Jean Cocteau's 1946 black and white version offered a far more sublime telling of the classic fairy tale using camera trickery which impresses to this day. Pan's Labyrinth is once again a close point of comparison to Cocteau's Beauty And The Beast, which del Toro has described as a parable which depends on "sublime, almost ethereal, imagery to convey a sense of doom and loss: mad, fragile love clinging for dear life in a maelstrom of darkness." Del Toro certainly knows a thing or two both about devising intricate and convincing in-camera effects (his use of CGI is usually complimentary rather than dominant), so it's little surprise that he considers Cocteau's film a haunting and enchanting masterpiece. Also recommended: Eyes Without A Face