The Devil's BackboneIn 1939, the waning days of the Spanish Civil War, old leftists (i.e. the ones who'd lose the war - the fascists won and General Franco ran the country for 40 years afterwards) operate a boys orphanage in the middle of the desert where they care for children, many of whom have no idea their parents have died in the fighting. They're also hiding a not insignificant amount of gold. One day, a new boy is delivered to the orphanage, Carlos, and bullying from the other boys is the least of his worries, as he immediately begins seeing a ghost around the orphanage: a little boy with a face like a broken porcelain doll, a cloud of blood rising from the wound above his temple. As Carlos' visions of the ghost increase, and the fascists gain control on the outside, a conflict within the orphanage reveals itself.
I love Guillermo del Toro's movies, and I adore his excesses, like hordes of monsters and luscious sets, but I think this movie, his most concise and disciplined, is his best and my favorite. There's only one 'monster,' but the ghost boy, Santi, is one of my favorite designs to come out of his movies.
Watched the old, silent Willis O'Brien dinosaur shorts featured on The Lost World Blu-ray.
R.F.D. 10,000 B.C. is an entirely animated, Flintstones-syle, 'cavemen act like modern folk' thing, while
The Ghost of Slumber Mountain combines live action and animation as a man looks through a magic pair of binoculars to observe the dinosaurs that lived in the surrounding mountainside millions of years earlier. The primitive beginnings of our genre!