Once A Reader of Narnia, Always a Reader of Narnia
This weekend I saw The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe with my family. My dh loved it. My kids loved it. My sister and her husband loved it.
I… have had a hard time putting words around how I felt about it.
It’s not hard to dissect the movie into various elements and discuss what worked and what didn’t. Aslan? Perfect graphics, wrong choice of voice. The Queen? Excellent portrayal, wrong physical build for the part. The children? All outstanding, a nice surprise. The story? Minor plot changes, but in substance, the same (to my great relief).
What’s harder is to accept this movie – the gestalt of it, the whole package. That effort may be an impossibility for me.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit the house my Grandmother lived in during my very early childhood. (She moved back to the farmhouse where she’d been born when I was, oh, nine or so, and the house was sold to some distant relatives.) I had spent a couple of Easters and Christmases in that home, and I had good memories of all its rooms. So it was a real shock to me to come back years later and realize how very tiny it was. I never knew it, as a kid. The house never felt small at all. Yet as an adult, I was stunned to realize it had only four rooms: a living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms. Oh, and one miniature bath. I could walk through the front door and out the back in 15 seconds flat. The ceilings were low. Even the yard, with its muscadine grapevine and big tank of propane, was not the giant playground of my memory but a small rural lot at the end of a dirt road with just enough room for the house, driveway, and clothesline, right by that grapevine and the gas tank.
Seeing Narnia as a 21st century moviegoer was a little like revisiting my Grandmother’s old house. I’ve always felt a fierce loyalty to the Narnia series. They were the first books that felt like friends to me, some of the handful that I read over and over and over again throughout my childhood. When I read them as an adult, they had lost none of their magic. Indeed, they felt bigger in some ways, because I caught more of the symbolism and theology in them than I had picked up on as a young reader.
Alas, the movie Narnia feels small to me. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was very well done, in many ways. But it did not capture my heart and enlarge my imagination as the book did. In my mind, the lamppost in the forest is stately and grand. The trees are massive, like redwoods. They extend for leagues and require days to journey through. Cair Paravel is like the great Scottish castles – thick, impenetrable, medieval. The Ice Palace of Jadis is otherworldly, foreign, and much more frightening than misty green lights can render. Tumnus’ home is homier, the Beavers’ dam is cozier and cleverer. Narnia seems more possible, in my mind. More like a real place that my heart could long to visit.
Perhaps no movie adaptation will ever be able to capture for me what Narnia is. Perhaps I’m asking too much of a limited medium. Or perhaps I’m past the age of being captured and owned by an imaginary world. I had hoped I was not.
I… have had a hard time putting words around how I felt about it.
It’s not hard to dissect the movie into various elements and discuss what worked and what didn’t. Aslan? Perfect graphics, wrong choice of voice. The Queen? Excellent portrayal, wrong physical build for the part. The children? All outstanding, a nice surprise. The story? Minor plot changes, but in substance, the same (to my great relief).
What’s harder is to accept this movie – the gestalt of it, the whole package. That effort may be an impossibility for me.
A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit the house my Grandmother lived in during my very early childhood. (She moved back to the farmhouse where she’d been born when I was, oh, nine or so, and the house was sold to some distant relatives.) I had spent a couple of Easters and Christmases in that home, and I had good memories of all its rooms. So it was a real shock to me to come back years later and realize how very tiny it was. I never knew it, as a kid. The house never felt small at all. Yet as an adult, I was stunned to realize it had only four rooms: a living room, kitchen, and two bedrooms. Oh, and one miniature bath. I could walk through the front door and out the back in 15 seconds flat. The ceilings were low. Even the yard, with its muscadine grapevine and big tank of propane, was not the giant playground of my memory but a small rural lot at the end of a dirt road with just enough room for the house, driveway, and clothesline, right by that grapevine and the gas tank.
Seeing Narnia as a 21st century moviegoer was a little like revisiting my Grandmother’s old house. I’ve always felt a fierce loyalty to the Narnia series. They were the first books that felt like friends to me, some of the handful that I read over and over and over again throughout my childhood. When I read them as an adult, they had lost none of their magic. Indeed, they felt bigger in some ways, because I caught more of the symbolism and theology in them than I had picked up on as a young reader.
Alas, the movie Narnia feels small to me. The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe was very well done, in many ways. But it did not capture my heart and enlarge my imagination as the book did. In my mind, the lamppost in the forest is stately and grand. The trees are massive, like redwoods. They extend for leagues and require days to journey through. Cair Paravel is like the great Scottish castles – thick, impenetrable, medieval. The Ice Palace of Jadis is otherworldly, foreign, and much more frightening than misty green lights can render. Tumnus’ home is homier, the Beavers’ dam is cozier and cleverer. Narnia seems more possible, in my mind. More like a real place that my heart could long to visit.
Perhaps no movie adaptation will ever be able to capture for me what Narnia is. Perhaps I’m asking too much of a limited medium. Or perhaps I’m past the age of being captured and owned by an imaginary world. I had hoped I was not.
posted by Mamabird @ 4:29 PM
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