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When I was two, I was inclined to certain misbehaviors in my bath. If memory serves, I believe standing up and fiddling with the knobs was involved. And splashing. During one particular bathing experience my mother had to leave the room briefly. So, she relied on my older sister, who was not yet five, to occupy me.
"Tell him a story," my mother said. And my sister did.
"Once," my sister said, "there were four children whose names were Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy. This story is about something that happened to them when they were sent away from London during the war because of the air-raids."
She was reciting, and she recited from the beginning of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to somewhere around Lucy's second passage through the fur coats. The rendition was abridged, but she hadn't done the abridging. Our cassette tape had. Ian Richardson, narrator, had read an abridged version to us so many times that my sister had a sizeable chunk of it word for word.
The film … well, the film isn't just abridged, and it isn't read by Ian Richardson.
Sitting in a Hollywood screening room, waiting for my advance glimpse of the Disney/Walden rendition of talking beavers and a forest-infested wardrobe, I have a lot of time to think about my relationship with Narnia. I wonder if I am capable of liking any film adaptation. Will I simply spend the entire time noticing small changes, unable to see the film apart from its inspiration? Probably.
Two was a good year for me. I sat through my first readings of Narnia, both abridged and unabridged. I sat in my highchair after dinner and listened to my father read to us as his father had read to him. That year I was introduced to both Lewis and Tolkien. My mother questioned my comprehension, but my father, ever optimistic, pointed out my red and sweaty cheeks, which made their appearance during scenes of battle.
I was marinated in Narnia, and I've been on a slow-roast ever since. I have no way of estimating how many times I have passed through those books, only how recently the last reading came—just last month. I love my mother, and I love Narnia. And if anyone chooses to show me an artistic rendition of either, they can expect criticisms. They can expect me to limber up and become a thorough and enthusiastic picker of nits.
Andrew Adamson, who brought us Shrek, Shrek II, and Shrek in the Swamp Karaoke Dance Party, is the director. Tell me that's promising.
But the story is far from ruined. The primary conflict remains virtually intact. The Stone Table scene is phenomenal. Aslan is effective and easily believable, and Lewis' Christianity has a loud presence. While book-readers like myself might be prone to stress and quibble, I expect this film to have nothing other than a deservedly positive reception in the broader evangelical world.
The film begins where it must, with German bombers over London. The opening sequence also gives us early tension and differences between Peter and Edmund, with Peter why-can't-you-do-what-you're-tolding his younger brother, a question which will serve as a bookend for the entire film.
The texture of the opening act is strong, and the casting works well. I find myself relaxing a little in my seat. But I wait for the inevitable, for some shifting of motivation, some change in dramatic tension that patronizes Lewis' original. That change does not come for a long while. But it does come.
Lewis himself had complaints about film adaptations. He was a lover of virtually every adventure story that could "introduce the marvelous or supernatural," including such prose-tripe as Voyage to Arcturus:
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