Here's a review that I found very interesting... particularly the discussion re. the four way *battle* between C.S Lewis, Tolkien, JK Rowling and Phillip Pullman:
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
The most striking thing about the dark forces in C.S. Lewis's The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is that they're not dark at all. Their natural habitat is a greeting-card landscape of powdery snow and glittering ice. And presiding over it all is Jadis, the White Witch, one of the most balefully beautiful femme fatales in the world of myth and fairytale.
It is hardly surprising that Lewis, a prominent figure in the fusty male circles formed by Oxford's literary dons of the 1930s and '40s, should have visualised the Devil as a woman. If he'd still been around, however, he may have found it disconcerting to see her brought to life with the scene-stealing glamour that Tilda Swinton brings to the part.
With her height, her hauteur and her translucent paleness, Swinton has a face and figure on which almost any message can be written as long as it has a kernel of seriousness. It is unlikely she'd be up to playing dizzy dames with Goldie Hawn or doing a duet with Bette Midler, but ice queens don't come any classier. And this presents a problem for Narnia's good deity, Aslan, the Great Lion.
Big he may be, but in comparison, he looks pretty creaky. Although he has the velvety resonance of Liam Neeson's voice working for him, he never quite manages to do a King Kong and transcend the fact that he was born of a marriage between computer and puppet maker.
Fortunately, everybody else measures up. It's easy to see why Disney chose to start with The Witch and the Wardrobe. It has all the lineaments of the classical fairytale, being both fresh and familiar. In the adventures of the four Pevensie children, who open an old wardrobe one day to find that it leads to a magical world, there are echoes of Lewis Carroll's Alice, Frances Hodgson Burnett's Secret Garden and E.Nesbit's Bastable books. But Lewis puts his own stamp on the story by peopling it with creatures drawn from his preoccupation with pagan and Christian mythology.
He also makes it a place where the children can influence events. In the real world, the Pevensies - Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) - are helpless onlookers. It's World War II and they have been evacuated from London to a spooky old house in the country, where all they can do is sit tight and stay safe. But in Narnia, the war between good and evil is one in which they find themselves playing key roles.
The film's New Zealand-born director, Andrew Adamson, who made such gleeful work of spoofing both Disney and the fairytale tradition in the Shrek films, has no trouble playing it straight this time. The film was shot mainly in New Zealand with the British designer Roger Ford and the Australian cinematographer Donald McAlpine bringing a sinister beauty to the wintry Narnia landscapes. And the best animators, model-makers and special-effects people in the business have successfully delivered Lewis's battalions of centaurs, minotaurs, minoboars, cyclops, ghouls and spectres to the screen.
There's charm without cuteness, too, in Ray Winstone's and Dawn French's voicing of the friendly Beavers and James McAvoy's brave faun, Mr Tumnus.
The only real touch of Disneyfication lies in the fact that not a drop of blood is spilled. People and animals fight and die, but they do not bleed.
The story is a transparently Christian allegory - something that caused Lewis's friend J.R.R. Tolkien to dislike it intensely. He resented Narnia's popularity, deplored the haste with which the books had been put together and believed that Lewis had compromised their effectiveness in emphasising their religious subtext.
Today's evangelical right sees the overtness of their Christian message as a good thing. The White Witch and her minions are being touted as an eloquent reply to J.K. Rowling's effrontery in pitching the idea in Harry Potter that there might be benign witches and wizards. And Narnia is part-financed by Walden Media, the production company set up by Republican billionaire Philip Anschutz to invest in films reflecting so-called family values.
So the politics of Fantasyland is a hot issue - one that is bound to become even hotter when Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy comes to the screen. Pullman, who won Britain's Whitbread award with his final volume in the series, is somebody else who cherishes a hearty dislike of Narnia's religious aspects. An atheist, he is against Christian proselytisers of any sort, and the complex plot of His Dark Materials is designed as a vigorous attack on organised religion.
For film-goers, all of this can only be good news. That's if the quality of the adaptations holds up. Regardless of what they have said about one another, Lewis, Tolkien, Rowling and Pullman have written magnificent stories, all displaying one overriding virtue - a reverence for the power of the imagination.
Thank you for that very interesting article. I'm rather enjoying this thread. I'm not a religious person by anyone's definition, but I did see the religious undertones in NARNIA. That said, I LOVED the movie, and enjoyed the books as a child. I don't remember them very well, though. I suppose that comes with being over 35
As for SOME evangelicals not liking Harry Potter...I have a niece and a nephew in who live in the southwestern US and their grandmother and uncle on their father's side definitely do not approve of their reading or watching Harry Potter. The same is true with some of their friends. Obviously, that's not true of every church-going person though.
I think the important thing to remember with Harry Potter and Narnia is that it gets children to READ, rather than sit in front of the TV watching garbage and playing video games.
