Films That Tread Into Narnia

Films That Tread Into Narnia | Dr. David C. Downing | Ignatius Insight | December 6, 2010

Most viewers assume that The Voyage of the "Dawn Treader", premiering this Friday, December 10, is the third adaptation of a Narnia book for the screen, after The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (2005) and Prince Caspian (2008). But actually this film is the 8th attempt to present Narnia on screen, if you count earlier film forays (or rather video voyages) into Narnia.

When Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind was first published in 1936, it took only three years for the novel to be turned into a major motion picture—the classic 1939 movie starring Clark Gable and Vivien Leigh. By contrast, the first of C. S. Lewis's children's classics, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, appeared in 1950, and it took 55 years for that story to reach the big screen in 2005. It might have taken even longer than that if not for the tireless, nearly lifelong efforts of Lewis's stepson, Douglas Gresham.

There are several reasons it took so long for the books to be adapted into films. Lewis himself considered the cinema an ugly art form, "disagreeable to the eye—crowded, unrestful, inharmonious." He wondered if the main reason people went to movie theaters was to keep warm on a cold, damp night. (Collected Letters 3, 105). Lewis was also strongly opposed to the idea of live-action film versions of the Narnia stories. He thought that stories about talking animals could be charming in imagination, but that they turned into "buffoonery or nightmare" when enacted by people in costumes. He felt that a human actor in a lion suit trying to portray Aslan would amount to nothing less than "blasphemy." (Shades of the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz!) Lewis was open to the possibility of animated adaptations of his Narnia books, but he regretted that Walt Disney's films so often mixed "genius" with "vulgarity" (CL 3, 1111).

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Comments

[Titus]

Actually, I had always thought that Aslan was among the better of the animals in the BBC series. The beavers and wolves, on the other hand, were dreadful. I was underwhelmed by the Hollywood Lion, the Witch, & the Wardrobe, and have simply passed on the subsequent installments, of which I have not heard good things (including, if I am not greatly mistaken, criticism in these pages).

[Mike]

I'm curious, does anyone know what "vulgarities" Lewis is referring to in Disney's cartoons? I knoe Tolkien didn't care for them (no doubt not nearly enough geneologies or etymologies for his tastes), but I'm curious what Lewis's objections were. As an aspiring Catholic animator, it's disheartening to hear some of my favorite Catholic authors despised the career I'm attempting to enter (and yes, I know Lewis wasn't Catholic)

[Titus]

I haven't read Lewis's writings on the matter, but I'll conjecture: the old Disney and Warner Bros. cartoons often relied on slapstick, caricature, dripping sentimentality, or some combination thereof. The result was often quite hilarious, and much better than almost any similar fare today. I think Lewis's criticism was of vulgarity in an older sense of commonness, rather than its more contemporary suggestion of profanity.

Lewis attempted to write stories that, while being for children, were challenging and ennobling. He likely viewed Disney's products as an incompatible form of mindless entertainment.

But that's really just a hunch.