Wednesday, March 02, 2005

Not a Tame Lion

Jollyblogger and GetReligion are commenting on the movie version of the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe that are in production. Specifically, how Christian are they going to be? Disney veteran Mark Kaplan had this to say:
There's enough story and traditional emotion in the 'Narnia' books that they can let the Christian mysticism in it either be a subtext or not a part of it at all. I suspect you can portray resurrection in the same way that E.T. comes back to life, and that practically every fairy tale has a hero or heroine who seems to be gone forever but nevertheless manages to come back.
That sound you hear is Clive Staples Lewis rolling in his grave. Fortunately Kaplan is only a commentor and hopefully not involved with the project directly.

The Narnia books are very deliberately influenced by Christianity. In the Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe the symbolism is very deep as Aslan, the Christ figure, dies for Edmund's betrayl only to live again. Immediately after his resurrection, he destroys the citadel of the White Witch and breathes new life into her stone captives. You don't have to hit people over the head with it, but you can't just work around it either. Hopefully they'll keep the "in your world I am known by another name" lines.

Terry Mattingly at GetReligion has this to say:
This is precisely the same dilemma faced by Peter Jackson and his crew as they began work on The Lord of the Rings, only the Christian themes and symbols used by apologist C.S. Lewis are much more explicit and, well, evangelistic. Jackson thought this through and made the crucial decision to leave J.R.R. Tolkien's vision intact, even if that produced behind-the-scenes worries that the films might be seen as too culturally conservative. That turned out to be a wise decision in the marketplace.
Thank God we didn't have 2 hour, heavily abridged LotR movies. Hopefully the producers of the Chronicles of Narnia movies will have the same insight. "Christian mysticism" is the soul of the work, if you cut out it's soul then you kill it.

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