Comparisons have been made more than once between JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, turned into a massive movie success by Peter Jackson, and CS Lewis’s Narnia books, the first of which has now been filmed. The link is made because Tolkien and Lewis were close friends, and because both wrote fantasy works after World War II, and because Disney is hoping some Lord of the Rings magic will rub off on its planned series of Narnia films.
But the linkage of Tolkien and Lewis is also misleading. The differences strike one more readily than the similarities when watching the new adaptation of Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. (This was his first novel for young readers; for the movie version, its name is prefaced by the cumbersome overall series title The Chronicles of Narnia, but we’ll ignore that from now on.)
Certainly, Tolkien disliked Lewis’s Narnia stories, which were an instant success in a way The Lord of the Rings was not. It must have been rather irksome to find that, while he had been labouring away for decades on his magnum opus, inventing everything from the botany to the languages of Middle Earth, his friend had dashed off a kids’ book in a few weeks and reached a whole new audience — one beyond that already devoted to his pop-Christianity works. Some resentment was to be expected, but Tolkien’s criticisms are apt.
He found the Narnia books slapdash, and too much of a pastiche — Christian iconography rubs shoulders with pagan mythology and cute little talking animals stolen from Beatrix Potter. All this is garnished with prim Englishness. Tolkien also, no doubt, found the books rather obvious, which they are.
The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe tells of four children, siblings (William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Scandar Keynes, and Georgie Henley) evacuated from London during World War II. Staying in a large country house, they accidentally discover a doorway (though the said wardrobe) into a magical land ruled by a wicked witch, the Cruella de Ville of Narnia (Tilda Swinton — the best thing in the movie). The kids participate in Narnia’s salvation from the witch, with the help of the great lion Aslan, Lewis’s Christ-figure. (The animatronic lion is voiced by Liam Neeson; Sean Connery was presumably playing golf.)
The movie is largely well realised, though the computer-generated effects and animation are not quite top notch. It is a Disney co-production, and it has the hallmarks of Disney all over it — the endemic cuteness, the somewhat ingratiating tone. It is most definitely a movie for kids, made in that condescending way Disney has perfected over the years and forgets only in the joy of untrammelled ‘toon-creation.
Much has been written already about the Christian allegory in the Narnia stories, and in this one it is obvious (the other, less allegorial books are in fact better). But how many of today’s youngsters will get the allegory is a moot point. Those who don’t get it will find aspects of the storyline puzzling. After all, they are not there to advance the story but to serve the allegory.
This is a problem the movie can’t solve. Allegory involves reference to another world or system beyond the overt story, and here it means that Narnia does not have the satisfyingly self-contained feeling of, say, Middle Earth. The story is constantly gesturing elsewhere in a rather portentous way. A mysterious ”prophecy”, ”the Deep Magic”, the inscription on a stone altar — these are all used to explain things the story can’t. There’s no motivation for Aslan’s sacrifice other than his Christlikeness. And why should the children become monarchs?
I loved the Narnia books as a kid, and on rereading them found them still compelling, despite the parts that now irritate me. But The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the movie, lacks something; perhaps it’s the way it seems suspended in a void, dang‒ling on invisble allegorical strings. The illusion of some kind of realness has not been achieved, and one leaves the theatre disappointed.