Directed by Guillermo del Toro.
Guillermo del Toro's wonderfully weird The Shape of Water is stuffed full of unexpected homages. Del Toro takes joy in mixing together a mish-mish of references to everything that's personally moved him in relation to this story - from epics. And the resulting texture feels fitting for a film that can best be describes as a Fairy Tale for Adults.
Del Toro saw creature from Black Lagoon when he was a kid. And he found his young heart longing for the creature to get happy ending with the woman he fell for. So, The Shape of Water began out of re-imagining this monster story - what if the beauty fell for the (so called) beast? Speaking o, we can't help but draw comparisons to Beauty and the Beast, especially Cocteau's version from 1946 which is also a sophisticated adult fairy tale.
A beautiful woman feels somehow different from other people - Belle is obviously beautiful to those around her, but her inner beauty makes her "weird" to them. Here, Elisa is the "princess without a voice". Del Toro told Variety that he wanted to create "A new type of "Beauty and the Beast" in which beauty is someone you can relate to - not a perfect princess."
The difference between this and Beauty and the Beast, Del Toro remarked on to Variety is that here "the beast doesn't need to transform to find love."
Elisa end up entering his underwater world. Her love story takes the form of musicals to show us how civilized, how heart felt, how refined her inner soul is.
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