Let the Chronicles begin ....

My Narnia collection ....

With the recent success of The Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter, not to mention the the current abilities of special effects departments, I guess it was inevitable that C.S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia would receive the big screen treatment. More specifically, Disney and Walden Media (the same team that stayed fairly true to the source material for Holes a few years ago) will be releasing The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe into cinemas this winter, hopefully fulfilling my fantasy movie fix that started right about the time that individual films of The Lord of the Rings series started being released in December. Besides the release date and genre, there is another similarity between and The Lord of the Rings and Narnia: both have had their special effects and costuming done by WETA, the New Zealand based team that seemingly rose out of nowhere to give Industrial Light and Magic a run for their money in terms of quality of effects.

As long as the movie isn't completely horrible (and I find it hard to see how it could be considering the source material), this will be a sure-fire hit in December. At the 1.75 screenings of Revenge of the Sith that I have been to so far, audience reaction to the teaser trailer has been enthusiastic. Both times, audible feedback included comments like "Wow ... Narnia" or "That looks like The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe" with parents leaning over their children, whispering, and pointing at the screen. This is a story that many people know, I think, and it is one that has seemingly slipped underneath the radar with the "new wave" of popular children's books ... yes Virginia, there were books that children read before Harry Potter and Lemony Snicket.

What really interests me is if director Andrew Adamson (Shrek, Shrek 2) will leave some semblance of the Christian subtext of the story in place, or will that be removed to make the movie more acceptable to a wider audience? I'm just as good at pseudo-analysis as the next person, and the line from the trailer "In this house there are many rooms" sounds a bit like the Bible ("In my Father's house are many mansions," John 14:2). To tell you the truth, I'm not really sure how the Christianity undertones could be taken out and leave anything that even resembles the same story, but hey, Hollywood has surprised me before.

Whatever the outcome of the movie, I hope that its release will perhaps open up a whole "new" series of books to today's youth ... giving them something to read in between Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and the release of the final book. I just hope that they will be able to read The Chronicles of Narnia in the correct order, as is shown in the picture above: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; The Horse and his Boy; The Magician's Nephew; and The Last Battle. Some genius got it into his head to renumber the books into chronological order (as opposed to published order), so the spine numbers of newer copies are different. This absolutely ruins several surprises in the stories, and it also dilutes some of the richness in the later books that are now supposedly supposed to be read first. It seems apparent that Disney is hoping to turn this into a big franchise (hence the "The Chronicles Begin" line in the trailer), so I'm hoping that they stick to the original order. If the movie is well-done and a success, I'd also like to see them work on several movies at once, as was done with The Lord of the Rings. I realize that only a few books have recurring (human) characters that would really necessitate such filming, but I'm an impatient person and I really don't want to wait 1.5 to 3 years for each movie to be released if the were all made at separate times.

I admit that seeing the trailer for the new film has once again sparked my interest in Narnia, so luckily, I won't have to wait until December 9th for the chronicles to begin ....