4. Pan's Labyrinth (2006)
There have been many amazing fantasy movies made throughout the birth of cinema but Pan's Labyrinth may well be the best. Guillermo del Toro is a director who works with deeply personal subjects usually through the eyes of fantasy or horror. This gives his films a feeling of passion and dedication that carries over to the audience in often remarkable ways. Here he decided to tackle the subject of the brutality of war and fascism through the eyes of a child. The way he presents everything from the point of view of a little girl, Ofelia, helps make Pan's Labyrinth a very special movie because it is able to devolve it's topics to their very core in ways that have never been done before. The fantasy element is taken very seriously and del Toro integrates it into the larger story excellently by having Ofelia's fantasy world mirror her real one in some terrifyingly creative ways. The Pale man is one obvious character that helps Pan's Labyrinth to stand out amongst it's peers but it's the fawn that best embodies del Toro's vision. Del Toro himself once stated, when referring to this movie, that the creatures from the film were very real to him. For that very reason he treats them with the same respect as his human actors, which causes the audience to completely sympathize with them in ways that the majority of fantasy films utterly fail at.