One of Guillermo del Toro's sketches for Pan's Labyrinth. To see more sketches and listen to an interview with del Toro, click here. • Pan's Labyrinth review • DVD review

Guillermo del Toro's visionary 2006 film, Pan's Labyrinth — a daring and moving work that's part war movie, part domestic drama, and part eye-popping, heart-stopping fantasy — amazed both critics and audiences when it premiered in the U.S. late last year. Mexican-born writer/director del Toro has established a solid audience in the U.S. with such English-language genre films as Mimic and Hellboy. His genial relations with fantasy film fans (he grew up as one himself) helped him court an audience for Labyrinth that wouldn't necessarily be seen attending a Spanish-language, at-least-partial art film. As a result, Labyrinth is the biggest-grossing Spanish-language film in American box office history, grossing almost $40 million here.

The movie, set in post-Spanish-Civil-War Spain, is about young Ofelia (Ivana Baquero) who is taken by her pregnant mom Carmen (Ariadna Gil) to a remote mountain village where the mother is to marry the savage fascist Capitán Vidal (Sergi López). Vidal is leading a vicious campaign to stamp out the Republican resistance in the area. Carmen's rich fantasy life — or is it? — leads to her discovery of a seductive but also monstrous faun (Doug Jones, who played aquatic Abe Sapien in del Toro's Hellboy) in the middle of a garden maze who informs her of her secret life as an underworld princess. And so parallel journeys begin...

As spectacular a cinematic experience as Pan's Labyrinth is, its special edition DVD package, out today, is an extras-packed thing of wonder in its own medium. Premiere spoke to del Toro about both the film and the disc recently.

Premiere: You've done two films set in the Spanish Civil War, and you yourself are Mexican; I think some people don't necessarily understand the significance of what Mexico represented to people who had been involved in the Spanish Civil War on the anti-fascist Republican side. Could you talk a little about how in your background that event took on so much importance, and about the Republican immigration to Mexico after the war.