Narnia

...Lucy thought the Beavers had a very snug little home...there were hams and strings of onions hanging from the roof, and against the walls were gum boots and oilskins and hatchets...and fishing rods and fishing-nets and sacks. And the cloth on the table, though very clean, was very rough...

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"a pair of tiresome beavers with Cockney accents who engage in sitcom-style banter."
(TIME magazine describing the Beavers in the movie version)
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I love Narnia. The Chronicles of Narnia are the first series of books I remember digging into again and again throughout my childhood. My copy of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader has water stains from being forgotten in my "fort" overnight once. I regularly imagined going to Narnia myself. Once, when about nine or ten, I saw a tree which had rotted almost completely away. All that was left was a spire about nine feet high, with an oval rotted out in the middle. I went through it, hoping it was a door into Narnia. Sadly, it wasn't. Even at the age of fourteen or so, visiting my aunt's huge old home, I tried to open the door of a big antique wardrobe in the dining room. It’s probably best that it was locked. It would have been very difficult to convince my aunt I wasn't insane if she had found me inside the wardrobe, tapping at the back. Imagination is a wonderful thing. It works within the framework of the story to fill in the gaps. What was she wearing? What color are her eyes? (I have always imagined Lucy’s eyes as green.) What do Mr. and Mrs. Beaver look like?

That's something movies lack. The only imagination you'll need is regarding the plausibility of the plot or the believability of the characters. During a movie you don't stare into space, reveling in trying to see Lucy's face, enjoying imagining Trumpkin. As I told friends when the movie version of LotR came out, my imagination may never be strong enough to clearly see the faces of those characters. And my imagination may never be clear on the faces of Lucy, Polly, Eustace, Aravis, Reepicheep or Puddleglum. But do I want to endure Andrew Adamson (the director) barging in over my imagination and slapping actors' and actresses' faces, voices, and costumes on the characters? Do I want "a pair of tiresome beavers with Cockney accents who engage in sitcom-style banter" in my Narnia? No, thanks. I prefer the Mr. and Mrs. Beaver of my imagination to remain the wise, wonderful, hospitable, kindly couple they really are. It’s a good thing the books will be unaffected by the movie. But won’t the movie impact the imaginations of the readers? Won’t they, henceforth, read through the imaginary filter of the movie version?

Wonderful, well told, well conceived, thoroughly Christian books, with the capacity to captivate readers through the beauty of the story and the nobility, courage, and humor of their characters, do not come often. Should they be trivialized into popcorn-n-soda fast food moving pictures? Why waste such treasure? This strikes me like someone transforming the works of Leo Tolstoy or Jane Austen into comic strip format. The medium blunting the message.

As with Middle Earth, Narnia is, if you haven't guessed, dear to me, so I don’t plan to tamper with my imagination of it by seeing the movie.