Did Lewis Oppose "Screen" Narnia as CNN Reports?

As is often the case with the MSM, it's hard to tell exactly what's going on but CNN reports that C.S. Lewis opposed making a screen version of the Chronicles of Narnia. The article, posted here, quotes a letter to the late BBC producer Lance Sieveking from Lewis.  The letter is published here.

Therein Lewis (assuming the letter is authentic, which it appears to be) praises the BBC radio production of one of the Chronicles of Narnia stories, The Magician's Nephew, yet Lewis also declares, "I am absolutely opposed – adamant isn’t in it! – to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wld. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wld. be to me blasphemy."

Now, is it correct to say that Lewis opposed a screen adaptation of the Chronicles of Narnia? Yes and no.  He speaks against a TV version of The Magician's Nephew and therefore, we can suppose, of the rest of the books. What he says of a TV version would seem to apply to film treatments as well--at least film treatments that would have been possible in Lewis' day--with the exception, Lewis implies, of a possible animated version by Disney. "Cartoons," as he notes, wld. [would] be another matter."

Lewis' reason for rejecting TV and by implication film versions of Narnia had to do with the way Lewis thought the depiction of the animal characters would come off using "photography". He could not have envisioned the kind of computer generated characterizations Disney is using to render The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or the special effects used to create Lewis' friend Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.

Can we say, then, that Lewis would have approved of a CGI version of Aslan? Not necessarily.  But we can say that the principle he gave for opposing a film depiction of one of his Narnia stories doesn't, given modern technology, now preclude producing films of the Narnia stories.

Comments

[Ed Peters]

Lewis must be spinning in his grave that people remember his opposition to a "TV" version of Narnia. Heck, I even thought the BBC version from, what, 20 years ago, was good looking.

[Fr. Joseph Fessio, S.J.]

I think it is in an essay on stories in, among other places, "Essays Presented to Charles Williams" that Lewis says of the filming of any literature "There is death in the camera". He explained that in a visual image, we are passive before the concrete images selected by the filmmaker. Whereas literature is both more universal and more particular; when we read "The old man walked through the meadow to the river", we have actively to supply all the images from our personal experience of old men, meadows, and rivers. The reader therefore actively participates (dangerous expression when used of the Liturgy)in the creation of the story. Tolkien and Lewis both speak of fantasy as providing an "other world", which is our portal to the only real other world, the supernatural. The images of film diminish the "otherness" compared to the written word. (No time to elaborate on that.) My conclusion: Lewis would not be enthusiastic about Faerie rendered into visual images. Except, perhaps, in that it would induce some to read the books who otherwise wouldn't.

Counterevidence: Tolkien himself drew images of Middle Earth and Lewis permitted drawings in the Narnia books.

[Mark Brumley]

It also appears that Lewis may have mellowed regarding film, since in his letter to the BBC producer Sieveking Lewis seems to have entertained the possibility of a cartoon adaptation of the Narnia stories.

The point about the reader supplying the images of the story he reads is an important one. Film can't replace that activity. However, film can do something else--provide a reader lacking in imagination or interpretive power with a deeper vision than he would otherwise have. Films can also give even the imaginative reader another way of seeing a story. These things can be enriching as well.

[Sandra Miesel]

The CGI Aslan is, of course, an electronic "cartoon" of especially high quality. Lewis did like Pauline Baynes illos for Narnia. It's a pity he didn't see the color ones she added in the '80s. If Lewis's remarks are taken to the extreme, they yield iconoclasm and would forbid all illustrations of literature. Good illustrations amplify the text rather than diminish it: would ALICE be "better" with Tenniel or WIND IN THE WILLOWS without Rackham? Or churches better without images?

[Mark Brumley]

Good points, Sandra.

[Mark Brumley]

Lewis scholar James Como has something interesting to say about Narnia and the book-to-film phenomenon:

http://www.ignatiusinsight.com/features2005/jcomo_narniamov_dec05.asp