It took C.S. Lewis five years to write “Chronicles of Narnia,” one of the best-loved children’s series of all time, and a half-century for his heirs to get it to the big screen but positive early reviews indicate the old fashioned yarn made the journey safely.
“The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” opens on Friday in North America and widely in Europe in what the Walt Disney Co. and Walden Media hope will be the first of a series based on Lewis’ seven books.
Los Angeles Times reviewer Carina Chocano described the film as “real by the logic of childhood” and noted that the book’s much-discussed Christian themes do not overwhelm the simple tale of four children’s adventures in Narnia.
“As a Christian primer, it’s terrible. As a story, it’s timeless,” Chocano wrote in a review on Wednesday.
Television’s Ebert & Roeper praised the cutting-edge special effects and called it “a fantasy that has charm … beauty and enchantment.”
Reviewers also praised the film for hewing faithfully to the novel’s plot about four children who escape the World War II London Blitz to a country house owned by an old professor.
They discover a magical wardrobe that leads to a wintry world inhabited by talking animals, a white witch and a Christlike lion named Aslan.
But the lush detail of the world of Narnia and the look of its characters sprang mainly from the imagination of director Andrew Adamson, who read the books as a child.
Adamson, who directed the animated hits “Shrek” and “Shrek 2,” spent 18 months searching for four “real kids” to star in his first-ever film directing real human beings.
He settled on four “normal” kids to play the Pevensie children and before committing to make the $180 million film, Walden Films and the Walt Disney Co spent a year perfecting the groundbreaking special effects to produce realistic creatures to interact seamlessly with the children.
“It was so important that this not be an imaginary land,” producer Mark Johnson told Reuters.
There was a lot of room for invention in Lewis’ loosely written 1950 novel. Adamson said he was surprised that the detailed battle scene he loved as a child occupied only a page in the book. “I didn’t want to make the book as it was, I wanted to make the book as I remembered it,” Adamson said.
But in some respects, that vision clashed with that of Lewis’ stepson, Douglas Gresham, a born-again Christian who manages the writer’s estate and oversaw the making of the film. As a result, there was much discussion before changes were made.
AN ARYAN TOUCH
Tilda Swinton, who plays Jadis the White Witch, added her own spin on the book’s villain, whose mission was to kill the children to prevent her prophesied downfall.
“I wanted to shake up the stereotype of the witch,” Swinton said in a recent interview. “We wanted to make her as Aryan as possible. These are children of World War II and the Nazis would be the thing they were most afraid of.”
Disney played on Lewis’ identity as a Christian author and on the book’s religious themes to market the film heavily to Christian groups.
Lewis once said that the idea for the Chronicles of Narnia began not with an intention to write Christian fables, but with the images of a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge and a magnificent lion.
“At first there wasn’t anything Christian about them. That element pushed itself in of its own accord,” he wrote.
After his 1931 conversion to Christianity following a famous nighttime walk with fellow fantasy writer and Oxford don J.R.R. Tolkien, Lewis went on to write some of the most famous 20th century Christian tracts, including “The Screwtape Letters.”
Christian viewers will see parallels between scenes in the film involving the death and rebirth of Aslan, in which the two girls spend a night weeping over his dead body before he returns to life and the New Testament’s descrip-tion of the resurrection of Jesus.