Poor Mister Tumnus
According to a recent story in the New York Times, Disney is creating a movie version of "The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe", the first volume in C.S. Lewis's classic for children Chronicles of Narnia. The film will feature animtronics and live actors, will be filmed like Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, and features some of the technical expertise of the Weta Workshop. Disney plans to do the whole merchandising shuck and jive, with theme park exhibits, merchandise, dolls, and more all based on Narnia. The movie is due out in early December 2005 (just in time for Christmas and Xmas merchandising, get it?)
While the advance of movie CGI technology in combination with live-action footage means that Tumnus the Faun is unlikely to be turned into Bambi (because Tumnus will not be a cartoon), it is hard for me to imagine that Disney won't do more violence to the spirit of Tumnus than did the White Witch. Tumnus the Faun is the first creature that Lucy, one of the Pevensie children, meets in Narnia, which she enters through a magical wardrobe. Tumnus invites Lucy for a cup of tea in his cave, which sports an extensive library with titles like "Is Man a Myth?" The gentle Tumnus is later turned into a stone statue by the White Witch for failing to betray Lucy. Although Aslan the lion eventually rescues Tumnus, it is pretty teary-eyed going for the five-year-old set until it is clear that Tumnus (and all the other victims of the witch's repression) will be converted back to flesh and blood from stone. (The flesh and blood to stone thing happens at more or less the same time as Narnia's "100 years of winter without Christmas" melts away.)
The real problem for Disney is not that they will convert the wonderful book to a cross between icky-sweet (which they've done to other classics, such as Pooh) and some over-loud sword-play aimed at thirteen year-olds. It is a foregone conclusion that they will do this, and ruin the thing. (So read the books to your kids before you let them watch the movie!) The deeper problem is a "honeypot" conundrum in the Narnia books themselves: the deep religiousity and Christianity (with a big C) that pervades these books. This stands in stark contrast to the Lord of the Rings, which may have deep spiritual values at its core, and certainly chronicles a deistic struggle with absolute evil, but explicitly endorses no clear religious or sectarian values.
The Christianity in the Chronicles of Narnia, in combination with the wonderful and magical fantasy of the non-religious material in the book, is frankly bizarre. The whole business of the great lion Aslan, "the only son of the Emperor beyond the sea," sacrificing himself for the traitor Edmund's sake, and then being ressurected, made no sense to me as a kid, but I loved the book anyway. I read the entire series twice to my son Julian when he was between four and six years old (we've since moved on to the Lord of the Rings). Baffled doesn't begin to describe his reaction to this stuff, and I found it very difficult to explain to him, particularly since to the extent that he has any religious education, it is Jewish. But the underlying message of the religious parts of the book is ultimately not one of tolerance. For example, in the end, Susan (the eldest of the Pevensie sisters, and one of the "four Kings and Queens of Narnia who ruled in Cair Paravel") doesn't get to go to what seems to be heaven because she has stopped believing in Narnia and is spending too much time focused on things like lipstick.
It would be a mistake to forget that this rather blatant and odd religious content is part of the Narnia books, although I think most children ignore it in favor of the wonderful fantasy of the books. (There have been some recent and ill-fated moves to secularize the books.) But because of the Christian religious content, the books are favorites (and have been for several generations) of the US Christian fundamentalist movement. Therein lies Disney's double-bind: they can secularize the books, and risk the wrath of the zealot consituents, or they can include religious content (which would be truer to the books) and be accused of intolerance (and lose the audience of secular parents and their kids like me). This one Disney can't win. I don't feel bad for them, though: they will certainly mess up some of my favorite children's books even without the religious dilemma.
Posted by Harold Davis at February 22, 2005 08:25 AM
