From Jesus to Fairyland

hellmutt linked to this article about the upcoming movie of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which says that the filmmakers are going to downplay the Christian allegory somewhat. Honestly, I never saw the allegory as THAT prevalent anyway. Yes, it was certainly there, and even as a kid I recognized it. In one of the books (I forget which one), Aslan tells a visiting British child something like, "In your world, I am known by another name. You will come to know me by that name." I'd say that pretty much seals the deal, wouldn't you? Nonetheless, the Chronicles of Narnia are hardly direct retellings of Bible stories. The circumstances of Aslan's death are very different from those of Jesus' crucifixion. I've heard people complain about the Christian symbolism in the Narnia books, but I think this sort of comes down to the separation of the artist from the art. The director even mentions this in that article: "Christian themes were very important to CS Lewis and imbued everything he did, but he himself denied any religious implications." He mentions Star Wars as another example of the resurrection theme, by which I assume he means Obi-Wan coming back to talk to Luke Skywalker. This isn't really a bodily resurrection, though, as the Bible teaches that Jesus underwent, and which Aslan and Gandalf go through in literature.

The article also mentions Philip Pullman's criticisms of the Narnia series, which are discussed in a little more detail here and here. I can see the charge of racism supported by Lewis' treatment of Narnia's enemy Calormen, a country that parallels Arab nations on our world, and is portrayed quite negatively. Calormen doesn't really come into play until later in the series, though. As for misogyny, I seem to recall Father Christmas telling either Susan or Lucy that "battles look ugly when women fight," but is that really Lewis' own opinion on the matter? Perhaps there's more misogynism in the books, but I can't recall any specific examples.

The Narnia movie looks to be inspired quite heavily by (some might even say "a rip-off of") the recent Lord of the Rings films, the first of which was released around the same time as the first Harry Potter movie. I don't see this as a bad trend. These are books I grew up with (well, not so much in the case of the Potter series), and I'm glad to see them adapted more faithfully than most book-to-movie adaptations have been done in the past. With the recent influx of fantasy films, fellow Oz fans have brought up the possibility of a new Oz movie along much the same lines. I think the main problem with this, aside from the fact that the Oz books have just never been as successful as other children's fantasy series, is the incredible success of the 1939 MGM film. Any new Oz film is going to be compared to it, and generally in a negative way, as happened with Return to Oz. Narnia and Lord of the Rings don't really have this same issue. They've both been filmed before--I've watched the Wonderworks version of The Lion (which was low-budget but quite true to the book) several times, and I also remember seeing an animated version of part of Rings--but none of the films have managed to supersede the source books in the way MGM's Wizard of Oz has. The movie is so ingrained in our culture that any film based on the later books would probably have to do one of three things: incorporate the changes made by MGM (as Return did with the Ruby Slippers [1] and the Kansas/Oz parallels), ignore these changes (which might confuse audiences), or explain what MGM got wrong (which would be pretty awkward, and perhaps difficult to do without sounding overly criticism of the classic movie). While the fact that Oz is a dream in the movie has been viewed (quite accurately, in my opinion) as the biggest change from the book, I also think it might be one of the easiest to overcome. I wouldn't be surprised if even some movie-only fans have a hard time buying the dream thing; and Return kind of incorporated both ideas by having Oz appear to be a dream, but finally turn out to be real. What I think would cause more trouble would be issues like Glinda being a separate character from the Good Witch of the North, and the Munchkins all dressing in blue and not all being short. None of this is to say that an Oz film WOULD necessarily be successful if the filmmakers managed to separate their project from the 1939 movie, but it might have a little more of a chance.

[1] As many people know, they were actually Silver Shoes in the book. However, the following two books, on which Return is based, don't actually include any magic shoes at all. What the Nome King uses to accomplish his transformations is the Magic Belt, a talisman that becomes one of the most annoying examples of deus ex machina in later books.