It has recently been reported the director Guillermo del Toro turned down the opportunity to direct The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. According to Yahoo News:
[He] was asked to direct “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,” but he turned it down because, as a lapsed Catholic, he couldn’t see himself bringing Aslan the lion back to life.
Instead, he put his dark, fervid imagination to work on an original story, “Pan’s Labyrinth,” a bloody and harrowing fairy tale that incorporates elements from C.S. Lewis’ beloved Christian allegory and various other classics of children’s literature.
Set during the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, “Pan’s Labyrinth” shows why del Toro’s sensibility is somehow both perfectly suited and utterly alien to the gentle “Narnia.” He subjects his hero, an 11-year-old girl whose mother has married a captain in Gen. Francisco Franco’s army, to shocking violence and vexing moral quandaries.
“I’m not proselytizing anything about a lion resurrecting. I’m not trying to sell you into a point. I’m just doing a little parable about disobedience and choice,” del Toro said. “This is my version of that universe, not only `Narnia,’ but that universe of children’s literature.”
Guillermo del Toro certainly has a creative vision, having brought to life such comic book characters as “Hellboy” which is about a demon that was conjured up by Nazis, and then rescued from them, and who fights against the forces of darkness. He also directed “Blade II” and the aforementioned “Pan’s Layrinth.”
This leads us to wonder what del Toro’s Narnia would be like. How would the characters have been different? We’ll never really know, and having seen none of del Toro’s films, I have to ask, would he have been the right man for the job? Would it have been a film of fantastical wonder? After all, he has “never been interested in working in the real world or with real characters.”
What do you think? If you’ve seen any of his films, how would his Narnia have been in comparison to Adamson’s Narnia?