Why The Chronicles of Narnia is a director’s biggest nightmare
Writing in 1959, CS Lewis put his finger on one of the major problems with filming his Chronicles of Narnia. “I am absolutely opposed – adamant isn’t in it! – to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare… A human, pantomime, Aslan w[ou]ld be to me blasphemy.”
Perhaps mercifully, Lewis did not live to see the 1967 ITV adaptation of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, in which Bernard Kay’s Aslan looks like a background extra from a village hall production of Cats; and although in the 1979 CBS cartoon Aslan has the perfect voice in the form of Stephen Thorne’s mighty basso profundo, visually this spiritual leader of Narnia looks like an escapee from the Beano.
Greta Gerwig would do well to heed Lewis’s warning. The director of Barbie is taking on two of the Chronicles for Netflix (although we don’t know which ones) and there are apparently talks between the streaming giant and Imax to release the first film during Thanksgiving 2026. Such business discussions might prove a welcome distraction for Gerwig who must surely be asking herself: is it possible to make a decent adaptation of them at all?
As well as those two aforementioned versions, there are the stodgy BBC productions which were aired between 1988 and 1990. At least here we have a splendid giant puppet Aslan of a quality Lewis could not have dreamed of, but the wolves, beavers and other animals are still distractingly played by actors doing their plucky best to be wolfish or beaverish. The Disney films, released between 2005 and 2010, were generally soulless affairs, although they performed well enough at the box office.
Perhaps the abandoned Narnia film that John Boorman worked on with the Jim Henson Creature Shop in the 1990s would have hit the spot, but somehow I doubt it. It is not so much that the good aspects of the adaptations are undermined by the less good aspects: for example, the stirring effect of Tom Baker’s brilliant rendition of Puddleglum’s defiant speech to the Green Lady in the BBC version of The Silver Chair (1990) being spoiled by her comical transmogrification into a singularly un-scary monster serpent. The problem is more that Lewis was a singular, eccentric writer with a powerful idiosyncratic vision that is inevitably diluted when transferred to the screen.
Films cannot capture the avuncular, ironic narrative voice which provides a comforting comic counterpoint to the physical dangers and emotional tribulations Lewis’s young human heroes undergo in Narnia. There are few finer opening sentences in literature, I’d argue, than that of The Voyage of the Dawn Treader: “There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it.”
And it is almost impossible to find young actors who can convincingly render the dialogue that the defiantly old-fashioned Lewis deliberately kept out of date. (“They are E Nesbit children; they ‘jaw’ rather than talk; they say ‘By gum!’ and ‘Crikey!’” Lewis’s biographer AN Wilson once noted. “They seem no more to belong to the mid-20th century than Lewis did.”)
Then there is the sexism. In the era of The Hunger Games, you can see why modern audiences baulk at Father Christmas ordering the Pevensie sisters not to take part in the forthcoming skirmish with the forces of the White Witch: “battles are ugly when women fight”. If this annoys feminists, however, it’s nothing to the outrage with which they discover in the final Narnia book, The Last Battle, that Susan is “no longer a friend of Narnia” and “interested in nothing nowadays except nylons and lipstick and invitations.” “She’s become irreligious basically because she found sex,” is JK Rowling’s gloss. “I have a big problem with that.”
The Disney films got round these objections by making Susan handy with a bow and arrow, and also positing that she need not be distracted by sex from an interest in Narnia by allowing her to snog the Narnian prince Caspian. But these changes are at odds with the stories’ roots in the medieval literature that served Lewis (whose day job was as an Oxford don) as an inspiration for Narnian codes of chivalry and notions of how women should conduct themselves.
And although it is easy to scoff at Lewis’s presentation of Narnia as a pure place where human sexuality and worldliness are not welcome - I don’t think I’ll be resuming my childhood habit of stepping into wardrobes in search of the place - it is also impressive in its own way, and the stories aren’t improved simply by watering it down.
Three of the seven Chronicles have never been filmed, and I would argue that they are Lewis’s most interesting. The Horse and His Boy, perhaps the most touching of the stories, has been accused of racism due to its depiction of the dark-skinned robe-sporting Calormene people, heathen worshippers of the god Tash instead of Aslan. The Magician’s Nephew, in which Lewis revisits the fatal illness of his beloved mother when he was a boy (although in this version her life is saved by the intervention of Aslan), is perhaps seen as strong meat for young audiences.
And even if your budget could cope with the epic scale of The Last Battle, Lewis’s teeming take on the Day of Revelation, not every viewer will appreciate nearly all of their favourite characters dying, even if they do end up in Heaven (“at last they were beginning Chapter One of the Great Story which no one on earth has read: which goes on forever: in which every chapter is better than the one before”.)
It is this aspect of The Chronicles of Narnia as Christian allegory that makes them so contentious today and every screen version has downplayed that aspect. When promoting their films, those behind the Disney version certainly seemed cautious. “[That] is something the press is more interested in than the world at large …When I read the book as a child I accepted it as a pure adventure story”, insisted the director Andrew Adamson, while Tilda Swinton, who played the White Witch, told reporters that the films were more “spiritual” than religious.
Such diplomatic vagueness may be avoided by Gerwig. Although there is no hint yet as to whether Gerwig will retain Lewis’s Christian message, it is worth noting that she had a Catholic upbringing and even managed to introduce religious motifs into Barbie (she deliberately modelled the scene in which Barbie’s creator Ruth Handler gives the doll a cup of tea on the depiction of God touching Adam in the Sistine Chapel). Perhaps she will be the first director to do justice to the great scenes in which the Christ-like Aslan, son of “the Emperor across the sea”, redeems the sinner Edmund by dying for him, and then is resurrected.
The power of Lewis’s books derives from his Christianity just as the His Dark Materials novels of Philip Pullman derive their power from his hatred of organised religion and the Christian God. Pullman loathed the Chronicles of Narnia and once stated that when he first read Lewis’s books as a teacher he: “realised that what [Lewis] was up to was propaganda in the cause of the religion he believed in.”
Incidentally, the 2007 film version of Pullman’s Northern Lights (The Golden Compass) diluted the idea of religious condemnation, although it was more present in the recent BBC/HBO adaptations.
In both cases what they may or may not be arguing is not important: it’s the fact that the act of arguing fuels their remarkable imaginations. But as the adaptations’ record shows, that power does not really survive at one remove from Lewis himself: take Narnia off the page and put it on screen, and it crumbles before our scrutiny.