Walden/Disney, I’m looking at you.
I’m looking at all three of the Walden/Disney films mind you, but in particular The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe since it was the most popular one and the most influential. I figured I would talk about it now because a new Netflix Narnia series directed by Greta Gerwig (director of Ladybird, Little Women, and the recent hit Barbie) is due to begin shooting this fall.
Oh, on the surface I liked the 2005 The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe well enough. I didn’t think it was completely awful. It was OK. But it took what was a magical children’s story and turned it into an elaborately designed, overly CGI’ed action film along the lines of The Lord of the Rings and any number of SFF films that came out in the late 1990s/early 2000s, such as Pan’s Labyrinth and Eragon.
First of all, Narnia isn’t an action series. Neither, strictly, was The Lord of the Rings trilogy; the quiet moments were more prominent than the battles and hair-raising escapes. But Tolkien did go into deep descriptions of the fighting scenes, whereas Lewis, sensitive to the age of his readers, did not. In LWW there were only two: the paragraph where Peter kills Maugrim, and the clash of Aslan’s forces and the Witch’s army at the end:
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Then they came out of the narrow valley and at once she saw the reason. There stood Peter and Edmund and all the rest of Aslan’s army fighting desperately against the crowd of horrible creatures whom she had seen last night; only now, in the daylight, they looked even stranger and more evil and more deformed. There also seemed to be far more of them. Aslan’s army—which had their backs to her—looked terribly few. And there were statues dotted all over the battlefield, so apparently the Witch had been using her wand. But she did not seem to be using it now. She was fighting with her stone knife. It was Peter she was fighting—both of them going at it so hard that Lucy could hardly make out what was happening; she only saw the stone knife and Peter’s sword flashing so quickly that they looked like three knives and three swords. That pair were in the centre. On each side the line stretched out. Horrible things were happening wherever she looked.
— The Lion the WItch, and the Wardrobe |
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That was as explicit as things got. Certainly not like that scene in the The Two Towers movie when the orcs load a catapult with the human soldiers’ decapitated heads and vault them all back into Minas Tirith … where we see them hitting the ground with a thunk thunk thunk before the shocked and disgusted faces of the townspeople. (THAT wasn’t in the book.) The same is true throughout the Chronicles: the fights and battles are not dwelt on and are over with quickly.
In contrast the 2005 movie played the final battle scene as the biiiig climax, with the Witch riding her polar bear chariot into a free-for-all melee of arrows flying, swords and axes swinging, and we actually see the terrible things happening like a griffon stoned in mid-flight who falls and shatters on the ground. Good luck putting him back together.
( In retrospect the polar bear chariot was silly. It looked impressive in the stills, but in real life, it doesn’t make sense. Bears can run, and run faster than you think, but they waddle and lumber. They lack the charging capacity of four-footed ungulates like horses or reindeer which can use their weight and speed to run down enemies and trample them with their hooves. The weapons of a bear are its snapping teeth and slashing claws and both would be hampered because of its harnessing. The troika couldn’t even bearhug anyone to death. Why couldn’t the production team have given Jadis a mean-looking woolly rhino with a big horn? )
The big, overly elaborate battle scenes also tie into the problem of big, overly elaborate production design. Did we really need Narnia to look like New Zealand with its rugged mountains and boulder-strewn moors? The setting overwhelmed the story. Narnia isn’t immense and wild. It’s less realistic, more inviting and fairytale, and the creators forgot that. More Cotswalds and less Scotland. It’s not a frontier, a place to tame. It’s a place to settle down and be comfortable in while yearning for a frontier.
The creatures of the movie, too, were unappealing. Seems the designers stuck to the side of realism when designing the minotaurs, centaurs, and other mythic beings, but seriously, this the magic land of Narnia. Why should such creatures have matted pelts and look like they smell bad? This is a kid’s fantasy. Why couldn’t they be more simple and idealized? Why cast towards adult ideas of biological speculation?
I also didn’t like some aspects of the casting. This sounds petty, but I want the Pevensie’s hair colors to match what’s in the book: Susan with long black straight hair, Lucy with golden waves, Peter blonde, Edmund, black or dark brown. Movie Susan looked too much like how I would imagine an older Lucy to look (minus the brown hair) and the Lucy, though quite cute, just didn’t convey Lucy’s golden sunniness. Edmund and Peter were OK, if aged up a bit; actually all the kids were, which makes sense when working with child actors. But if that was to make them fighting in a realistically staged battle against grown men – OK, grown monsters – palatable, it failed. They’re still kids! It makes sense in a fantasy book that is supposed to impart some lessons (and where the fighting is undescribed) but not in a big-screen fantasy action movie meant to appeal to adults.
It comes down to the watcher’s sense of belief or disbelief. It’s easier to believe the kids were effective warriors (without training I’ll add) if we don’t see it, we just take the filmmaker’s word for it because of the results. And how I hated that the movie jumped on the fantasy trend of hypercompetent female archers, which in retrospect dates it. Movie Susan was posed like Katniss Everdeen in promotional shots.
Let’s not even bring up Peter riding a unicorn. Not in the book. Thematically impure.
Also related to a level of realism that isn’t needed: the parts about the London Blitz. Lewis didn’t dwell on it. In fact, he never mentioned it again beyond the first paragraphs. It wasn’t important to the story. Including it was just a way to age up material that can’t be aged up without ruining it. (Note: I did like the 1940s costuming, especially Lucy’s cute outfit and her stuffed dog.) There was also an extended sequence involving the Pevensies crossing a river in which the ice was breaking up — a very long sequence, which seemed to me to go on forever. It was boring. And wasn’t in the book. And made no sense, because the ice was breaking because Aslan had returned and the long winter was ending. Why the heck would Aslan have created, even unknowingly, such a peril for Narnia’s four saviors? I know I’ve listed a lot of nitpicks here, but this is the biggest one. It just doesn’t make sense.
I am hoping Gerwig’s Narnia, which begins with The Magician’s Nephew, doesn’t run off in this direction.
( If I have any nostalgia for the Disney/Walden LWW, it’s more for the publicity. The internet was gaining lots of steam in that year, with new specialty sites like Pinterest and Tumbler posting memes, fanfic and fanart, party ideas, and more, more than it deserved, frankly. It’s a little sad to see remnants of all that hoopla now, evidence of an earlier, kinder decade. )
