The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe

There's something very elemental in the idea of crawling into the back of a giant, fur-filled cupboard and finding it leads into a magical, timeless world. The sort of feeling, when you read it, that you kind of thought it up yourself when you were a kid, and someone else wrote it down for you. Which I think goes a pretty long way to explaining why a lot of people have a pretty strong connection with The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe (I refuse to call it 'Narnia'). I certainly do, and have very fond memories of my dad reading it to me and my brothers, and of being quite traumatized, not by the death of Aslan, but by the humiliation of Aslan, the shaving of him. Seeing a great being bought low, and that he went willingly to his fate- that was the worst part, I think.

Anyway, I didn't have high hopes for the film, but actually came away feeling pretty happy- certainly if I was a kid I would have thought it one of the best films I'd ever seen. Disney are obviously still smarting from turning down The Lord of the Rings, and this films seems very badly to want to be 'LotR for kids', a role it fills in pretty nicely- after two hours of tooty grins and bloodless chase scenes it actually comes across as something of pleasant shock when in the final battle beasties get smashed by rocks, stabbed in the head with swords and bitten in the face by lions. The LotR impression is cemented by the kiwi landscape, kiwi effects design, kiwi costume design- in fact it seems to have been made by the old LotR crew, which is cool.

One thing I did find a bit odd after the WWII opening scene was Lucy's first meeting with Tumnus. He's his naked, hairy dude who invites her back to his house, where he drugs her and then starts crying saying: "I've done something terrible." Eek! Not quite the same effect it had when written in the 50's, I'm sure. Still, a valuable lesson to all little girls not to go home with strange, naked men.

The kids' acting is usually pretty patchy, but kids are pretty patchy in general so it kind of suited them. The white witch is creepy and cool (and who wouldn't betray their siblings in order to get wrapped up in a fur coat and eat Turkish Delight with her?), Aslan (and most of the creatures, I should say) looks great although I found Schindler's voice coming out of him a little distracting.

Overall- Narnia is a good time in a dark room. It's not exactly breaking new cinematic ground the way LotR did, but it's taking that new kind of 'anything is possible' film-making and using it to bring a great fairy tale to life, and I think that's a pretty good thing. I recommend it.