The famous chronicles were written by C S Lewis after World War 2, in an atmosphere of rationing and fear of the future; and their intense, magical presentation of the alternate, luminous world of Narnia, where values such as decency and bravery count, have made them classic escape portals into joy, adventure and love for generations of children. Lewis's Christianity is woven into the Narnian mythology.
In this Disney-Walden production, there is, thankfully, no attempt to Americanise or update the Brit idiosyncrasies of the displaced siblings - packed off parentless to the countryside as German bombers pound London, and learning the elements of survival in a universe of strange creatures, a wasteland of perpetual winter which they must help redeem from its curse by witnessing the sacrifice and resurrection of the Christ-figure, Aslan the lion. The power is in the storytelling, tinged with allegory.
In the wake of Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings trilogy, the battles and stunning landscapes have, alas, an element of belatedness: but the use of Andrew Adamson as director (he made Shrek) introduces very different elements of charm and visual texture. J R R Tolkien's famous immersion in his darkening, premedieval saga is on an altogether different scale from Lewis's fairy tale; nor are there any useful comparisons with the Harry Potter series.
The children - Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Lucy (Georgie Henley) - are all buttoned-up, polite, and a little nervous, as well they might be: the initial bombings have an awful realism.
In the rambling home where they are placed (presided over by Jim Broadbent), the worst they have to fear is boredom on rainy afternoons, and, stumbling into a wardrobe to hide in a game, little Lucy (with the certitude of innocence) passes through the gateway into frozen Narnia where she immediately encounters a faun (James McAvoy). He tells her of the plight of the land, the awaited return of Aslan, and the reigning power of the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), a demonic ice queen.
As the evil stepmother of folklore, Swinton - in a spectacular performance - fills out an unusually incongruous dramatis personae, and is often cited as the exemplar of Lewis's misogyny. This is unfair, since Lucy is the real, or at least human, pivot of the action. Her misery at Aslan's death may prove deeply disturbing for the really young ones taken to see the film. However, the writer's Narnia seems a place where anything is possible, and its inhabitants are promiscuously drawn from any number of mythologies (of which Lewis's friend Tolkien disapproved), including Christianity.
Apart from the faun, there are centaurs, talking animals, sentient trees, even Father Christmas - an oddity in any terms. Any evidence of sex and sexuality has been removed, which, to me, debases Aslan (voiceover by Liam Neeson), who looks like a big stuffed toy rather than the Son of God. The producers - well aware of the purchasing power of the Passion of the Christ demographic - are marketing the film as chockfull of fundamentalist family values, missing the point.
Jackson's King Kong projects a stronger force of nature than Aslan, who is blurry. However, in his adult science fiction, Lewis was preoccupied by a concept that has had some attention in the genre: it is that if there are other, perhaps innumerable worlds, it may be that some are fallen - in the theological sense. Each might then need its own messiah. This speculation underlies Lewis's Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra. In the latter, a man called Ransom travels to Venus - a form of cosmic Eden - where he must do battle with a satanic being called the Unman, forestalling the commission of an original sin that would render Venus "silent", separated from God. In Narnia, Aslan is the ransom to be paid for the redemption of a world in thrall to the icy White Witch.
I doubt there is much propaganda to be made from the essential nature of Aslan: Lewis's allegorical ambitions are subsumed to his imagination. In the best sense, that imagination was childlike - he saw as a child. He saw a world of unimaginable wonders behind the everyday, and the film does its best to make it real.
