The Chronicles of Narnia – Controversial?
Posted on February 25, 2005, under Entertainment.
Disney is having a hard time deciding how much history to reveal about their upcoming December 9 release of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.”
The ‘problem’? C.S. Lewis based the story off of his personal faith and the history of Jesus Christ.
But this time, the pros at Disney are wrestling with a special challenge: how to sell a screen hero who was conceived as a forthright symbol of Jesus Christ, a redeemer who is tortured and killed in place of a young human sinner and who returns in a glorious resurrection that transforms the snowy landscape of Narnia into a verdant paradise.
I think to a lot of people this doesn’t come as much of a surprise (search Amazon for books by C.S. Lewis), but some related to Disney seem very worried, and want to distance the story from the greater story it was originally written to allude to. This is just one more thing that tells me a large part of Hollywood, including some at Disney, are out of touch with a large part of its intended audience. However, the Senior Vice President of Publicity, Dennis Rice, said:
“We are trying to make this movie to be as faithful to the book as possible. And if you connect to the book, we think you will connect to the movie.”
I sure hope that’s true. They don’t need to put forth extra effort to be ‘Christian’, but hopefully they will be true to the story and the nature in which Mr. Lewis wrote it. Hopefully Disney doesn’t ruin the story with Political Correctness and abstracting Postmodernism.
All that having been said, I’m really looking forward to seeing this movie, as I was read these books and watched the mini-series on TV when I was younger. I’m excited Weta is doing the effects, given they did an amazing job on LOTR. Apple has a quicktime teaser for the movie, go check it out.
By the way, contrary to some extraneous commentary on the LOTR DVDs, J.R.R. Tolkien was not a “pagan”, and was partially responsible for introducing his personal friend, C.S. Lewis, to Jesus Christ.
