'Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion'

The Guardian ^ | 12/5/05 | Polly Toynbee

[TFFKAMM]

Children won't get the Christian subtext, but unbelievers should keep a sickbag handy during Disney's new epic, writes Polly Toynbee

Monday December 5, 2005
The Guardian

Aslan the lion shakes his mighty mane and roars out across Narnia and eternity. Christ is risen! However, not many British children these days will get the message. The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe opens this week to take up the mantle left by The Lord of the Rings. CS Lewis's seven children's books, The Chronicles of Narnia, will be with us now and for many Christmases to come. Only Harry Potter has outsold these well-loved books' 85 million copies.

How suitable that one fantasy saga should follow on from the other, despite the immense difference between the writings and magic worlds of these two old Oxford dons. It was JRR Tolkien who converted CS Lewis to Christianity during one long all-night walk that ended in dawn and revelation. Narnia is a strange blend of magic, myth and Christianity, some of it brilliantly fantastical and richly imaginative, some (the clunking allegory) toe-curlingly, cringingly awful.

This new Disney film is a remarkably faithful rendition of the book - faithful in both senses. It is beautiful to look at and wonderfully acted. The four English children and their world are all authentically CS Lewis olde England. But from its opening scenes of the bombing of their Finchley home in the blitz and the tear-jerking evacuation from their mother in a (spotlessly clean) steam train, there is an emotional undertow to this film that tugs on the heart-strings from the first frames. By the end, it feels profoundly manipulative, as Disney usually does...

[Mr. Jeeves]

I wonder, if you took a religious story and turned it into a homosexual story (by changing the gender of a single character), would the critics love it or hate it?

That's it. If Aslan had been a gay lion and left his lover Bruce the Cheetah to go off and nobly be slaughtered by the White Witch and her Christian Coalition followers, all would have been well in Critic-land. ;)

[coydog]

Don't laugh, there's probably some "furry fan" out there writing lamentable fan fiction with just such a plot.