Watch: Guillermo del Toro Is a Master of Disobedience

In disobedience lies Art. In disobedience lies Progress. From Aristophanes to Cervantes to The Beatles to Jackson Pollock to Jean-Luc Godard, we are taught, repeatedly, by example, that, to quote many a sports film, those who break the rules make the rules. In his latest virtuosic video essay, Evan Puschak, aka "NerdWriter," takes us inside the work of Guillermo del Toro, showing that in films such as ‘Pan’s Labyrinth‘ and beyond, the director breaks the rules of storytelling, violating the form that the Grimm’s Fairy Tales put before us, as his characters work against story paradigms to carve out spaces for themselves–and the results have been stupendous, making del Toro an idol for those who privilege the imagination over all that would conspire to crush it.