'COURSE HE ISN'T SAFE:

REVIEW: of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (Jeffrey Overstreet, 11/18/05, Christianity Today)

Those who don't know the book won't find anything amiss. Those who do will realize that Adamson's excisions do more than just quicken the pace—they change the nature of important characters.

The beavers, vividly voiced by Ray Winstone and Dawn French, are a cartoonish but likeable pair. But they're robbed of significant lines that build our apprehension of meeting Aslan and help us understand his kingship. The book's devotees will be dismayed to find that Mr. Beaver is denied his famous speech about Aslan's power and authority: "Who said anything about safe? 'Course he isn't safe. But he's good. He's the King, I tell you." [....]

It is a shame to have lost any of Wardrobe's wonderful resonance. But in spite of some grave errors in judgment, Adamson's film is still an admirable success. Let's keep things in perspective: It was once rumored that other filmmakers were moving the story from London to present-day L.A. after an earthquake, casting Janet Jackson as Narnia's Witch, and packing Narnia's streets with wisecracking critters à la Madagascar. Adamson and company should be commended for respecting Lewis's imagination as much as they did.

Lewis described a story's sequence of events as "a net whereby to catch something else." While Aslan's intimidating power and glory has escaped them, the filmmakers have "caught" the essence of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. And they've blessed the holiday season with a first-class family film that will stand tall after Lewis's detractors have spent their feeble arrows.

With its story of a savior who suffered the consequences for others' sins, and whose power proved greater even than death, this meaningful myth reflects rays of hope into a culture paralyzed by the chill of unbelief, where many really would prefer a winter without a Christmas.

MORE:
Hollywood turns a page: The movie company behind 'The Chronicles of Narnia' views films as a powerful tool for inspiring kids to read. (Gloria Goodale, 12/09/05, The Christian Science Monitor)

Micheal Flaherty is a man on a mission, one that began humbly enough, with an ice-filled sink in a blue-collar suburb of Boston. Mr. Flaherty, now president of Walden Media, the unconventional film company behind "The Chronicles of Narnia," was teaching a weekend exam prep class for poor students. "The real challenge there was to get their attention on a Saturday morning," he says of that day in 1997.

The sub-zero water played a key role when he realized the kids would spark to topics they already liked. "Titanic" fever was raging at the multiplexes as he was struggling to bring a science section to life. One of his pupils wanted to know just how cold that ocean was and plunged his arm in that chilly sink. From there, the class headed to a museum and then the library for more books about the tragic event.

Inklings of immortality: Oxford provided CS Lewis and his illustrious colleagues with inspiration for their fantasy worlds. (Max Davidson, 03/12/2005, Daily Telegraph)

Where did Narnia come from?

The question is susceptible to so many answers that it is probably foolish to pose it. But one of the answers, surely, must be the wartime Oxford in which Lewis and his fellow Inklings lived.

It must have been an odd, twilight world, with so many young men away at the war. The pre-war rituals of tutorials and toasted crumpets and punting on the river must have seemed arid; while the horror stories emerging from Nazi Europe would have been unbearable to a sensitive man like Lewis.

He was a devout Christian, though not a pacifist, and joined the Home Guard, with which he tramped around the city with a rifle, following the bidding of the local Captain Mainwarings. Was he a Sergeant Wilson or a Private Godfrey? A bit of both, no doubt.

More significantly, he placed his large house in Headington at the disposal of children who were being evacuated from London. Never having married or had children of his own, he enjoyed their company more than he expected. One of them, a small girl, took an interest in one of his wardrobes and asked if she could go inside it...

While Hitler was laying waste Europe, a writer associated with academic books about literature and theology turned his thoughts to strange new worlds, where goodness could be triumphant.

The Roar Over C.S. Lewis's Otherworldly Lion: For 'The Chronicles of Narnia,' Buzz of Biblical Proportions (William Booth, 12/08/05, Washington Post)

A timeless fantasy about talking beavers, friendly fauns and a mystical lion named Aslan? Or insidious militaristic propaganda cunningly used to inoculate innocents with rigid Christian dogma penned by a pervy pipe-puffing Oxford prig who actually didn't very much like little children and might have slept with a woman old enough to be his mother? When he wasn't drinking. In pubs. With J.R.R. Tolkien.

"C.S. Lewis, Superstar." That's the December cover of Christianity Today (which compares the deceased scholar of medieval poetry, seriously, to Elvis). David Bruce, the founder of the faith and pop culture Web site Hollywood Jesus, writes, "God is speaking to this culture through its mythical movies." With a stream of teaching aids and Sunday sermons, some evangelicals are hoping that "Narnia" will do for tots and tweeners what "The Passion of the Christ" did for adults.

Or not. Philip Pullman, author of the "His Dark Materials" trilogy of children's fantasies, describes "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" as "a peevish blend of racist, misogynistic and reactionary prejudice."

"Here in Narnia," writes Polly Toynbee in the Guardian newspaper, "is the perfect Republican, muscular Christianity for America -- that warped, distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right."

So what is it?

Ummm...Christianity is evil and Americans are fascists?

Posted by Orrin Judd at December 8, 2005 1:18 PM