I was flipping through a movie magazine while doing cardio at the gym recently, and I discovered that Disney had abandoned the Narnia franchise after only two movies due to disappointing box office numbers for Prince Caspian. The next film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, is being released under the aegis of Fox instead - the curious among you may examine the first trailer on the Apple web site.
Narnia is one of the foundations of my childhood. As I’ve mentioned before, my mother read the Narnia books to my siblings and myself long before we could really understand them as stories, so I learned about Narnia at the more or less the same time I was learning to talk. However, that's not the only thing that I (literally) learned at my mother's knee. I was raised to believe that Walt Disney is an evil empire, a perverter of truths in the interests of marketing, so it was with some degree of trepidation that I originally discovered that Disney was going to be producing the screen version of Narnia.
Whatever your opinion of the House of Mouse, you can't argue that they know their business when it comes to capturing the hearts and minds of children. (And the wallets of their parents.) That being said, it's impressive that they were able to take C. S. Lewis' classic children's fantasy series, a series whose popularity has continued for over 60 years, and fail with it to the point that they dropped it like a hot potato. It's even more impressive when you consider that the Lord of the Rings films had already taken the risks necessary to prove the existence of a movie marketplace for classic fantasy.
It’s not common knowledge, but Lewis and Tolkien were not only contemporaries but friends, and were in fact writing their respective fantasy masterpieces at about the same time. C. S. Lewis’ fantasy world has always had a less prominent profile than The Lord of the Rings, perhaps due to its less aggressive content - Narnia has its share of wars and battles, but it lacks the epic sweep of Tolkien’s world. Lewis was also writing for a younger audience than Tolkien, and it’s undeniable that the Narnia books virtually defined the genre of juvenile fantasy for a long time.
But there’s a much more fundamental difference between the material, and it’s that difference which so strongly affects the respective motion picture adaptations. The Lord of the Rings portrays an epic struggle between Good and Evil, with the Ring itself acting as an ongoing test, a constant temptation for all the characters who are presented with the opportunity to possess it. Some pass this test, some fail it – in fact, Frodo himself fails at the final moment in his quest.
On the other hand, it's generally accepted that the story of Narnia is an extended Christian metaphor, but what does that mean in practical terms? The various journeys to Narnia by people from our world are journeys of belief, explorations of spirituality, of faith. The characters are constantly being required to take - or not take - action based on their belief in Aslan, and the spiritual nature of those decisions help to make them better people, both in Narnia and when they return here.
The temptations faced by the characters in the Narnia books are more subtle than the One Ring, but they are just as constant. Those who succumb are punished, and those who resist are rewarded - but even those who succumb may achieve redemption.
It’s this aspect of Narnia which is least well realized in the movies, and that may well be the reason that they haven’t done better at the box office. In the process of trying to turn them into conventional fantasy action adventures, Disney lost touch with the essence of the Narnia books, and in losing touch they cheapened the stories to the point where they lost their attraction.
Movies like The Chronicles of Narnia clearly demonstrate that special effects have advanced to the point where virtually any world of the imagination can be recreated for public consumption. But in that process, I think that filmmakers have to remain true to the underlying foundations of those worlds - you might even say that they need to have faith in them.
- Sid
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