C. S. Lewis wrote a letter to a girl named Anne in 1961 explaining some of the deeper elements to the Narnia Series. He said the following:

"The whole Narnian story is about Christ. That is to say, I asked myself 'Supposing there really were a world like Narnia and supposing it had (like our world) gone wrong and supposing Christ wanted to go into that world and save it (as He did ours) what might have happened?' The stories are my answer. Since Narnia is a world of Talking Beasts I thought he would become a Talking Beast there, as he became a Man here. I pictured Him becoming a lion there because (a.) the lion is supposed to be the King of beasts: (b.) Christ is called 'The Lion of Judah' in the Bible: (c.) I'd been having strange dreams about lions when I began writing the books. The whole series works out like this:

The Magician's Nephew tells the creation and how evil entered Narnia.

The Lion etc ——— the crucifixion and Resurrection

Prince Caspian ——— restoration of the true religion after a corruption

The Horse and his Boy ——— the calling and conversion of a heathen.

The Voyage of the Dawn Treader ——— the spiritual life (especially in Reepicheep)

The Silver Chair ——— the continued war against the powers of darkness

The Last Battle ——— the coming of Antichrist (the Ape), the end of the world and the Last Judgement."

I still think they are gonna voice effect the heck out of Meryl Streep’s voice to be unrecognizable deep and masculine especially after Greta Gerwig keeps referring to Aslan with he/him pronouns. 🙂 I too was against the casting until this but after her keeping his pronouns the same I still think this is the case.

He didn’t care about Digory or Polly at all like what 💀 No concern for their safety.

There’s a difference between disliking an adaptation, criticising its creative decisions, and approaching every available detail as if you’re investigating a conspiracy, and some of the latter are beginning to sound borderline mentally ill.

People are reading extraordinary amounts of ideological significance into individual casting choices, interpreting creative decisions as deliberate acts of hostility towards Christianity, and treating their own suspicions about the filmmakers’ intentions as though they’ve uncovered some hidden agenda.

I saw someone saying confidently that because the windows of the Eagle and Child pub (where C.S. Lewis met with Tolkien in Oxford to compare writing while at Oxford) are broken by Jadis’s magic in the trailer— that obviously means Greta Gerwig hates Lewis’s work and wants to destroy it.

These people sound unhinged, and I don’t say that as an accusation, it’s just genuinely worrying.

And the religious outrage is particularly strange when you consider what we’re actually talking about: an adaptation of a beloved Christian allegory. It’s perfectly reasonable to care about how C. S. Lewis’s work is adapted, to disagree with particular choices, or to worry about whether an adaptation understands the source material. But there’s a considerable distance between those concerns and treating deviations from your personal expectations as evidence of an attack on your faith.

What I find most telling is how some people seem determined to find something to be angry about regardless of what the trailer actually shows. When one argument falls apart, the objection shifts to something else. When a creative choice can’t reasonably be interpreted as hostile, it becomes evidence of something more subtle and insidious. The theory keeps changing, but the conclusion remains fixed: somebody, somewhere, must be trying to undermine the things they believe in.

At a certain point, you have to ask whether these people are evaluating the film in front of them or simply projecting their existing fears onto it.

Nobody has to like the trailer. Nobody has to approve of every adaptation choice. But there’s a difference between substantive criticism and a worldview in which every disagreement, every unexpected casting decision, and every departure from your preferred interpretation becomes further evidence of a hostile agenda. At the end of the day it’s just an adaptation of a popular book— nobody is out to get anyone, and if you feel otherwise you might need to step back and examine your thinking.

And honestly, some of these reactions seem to tell us considerably more about the anxieties of the people making them than about the film itself.

https://x.com/vhsdvdbluray4k/status/2110742434322014285?

Proposed change 3 looks like a very obvious not back door to silence people who speak out against the changes

I know it’s a slight departure (at least one can assume) from the book, but I quite like the fact that Digory is Irish in this new version, given the fact that CS Lewis himself was Irish. It feels like a nice nod to that.

I've recently finished reading these two (for the first time). I will admit that I enjoyed both. However, I didn't enjoy Prince Caspian as much as Lion, Witch, and Wardrobe. As for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, I couldn't find the right words to describe it but the end was kind of emotional for me, and I love the fact it made me feel that way. Anyone else who felt the same towards these two?

P.S. I'm taking a break from Narnia, and headed back to the Discworld then back again to Narnia. 😆

Visually, the movie looks really good.

Was anyone really concerned on if the movie would look visually stunning?

However, what we can take away from the trailer, is that Gerwig is really does seem to be going with the "rock and roll" version of Narnia that she has been talking about.

I was not a fan of the music choice at all, surprised most people liked it.

Maybe I'm old fashioned, but I don't want modern Led Zeppelin rock in a medieval high fantasy movie.

So peoples fears of her "modernizing" the Narnia story seem to be coming to fruition.

I'm assuming people are going to say "its just the trailer", but I don't why she would sign off on the trailer having this music if she wasn't going to include it in the movie.

So let's say for the sake of the argument, the soundtrack is like modern rock. We are all ok with this?

An even more interesting question that I want to pose to the people who are constantly advocating for a "new", "fresh", "unique", take on the movie, if the song Aslan sings to create Narnia is some sort of rock and roll Led Zeppelin style song....y'all are going to be ok with that? Think its cool / awesome / unique?

So we didn't get much from the trailer but what we can take away is that people that were concerned that Gerwig is going to try and be unique by adding modern elements to Narnia like "rock and roll" are having their concerns well founded.

Interested in this: Why are there only seven (eight counting Susan) friends of Narnia? Why does Aslan only appear to the Pevensie children and Jill and Eustace?

Ever since it was first announced that Netflix secured the rights to Narnia, many were speculating in which 'form' it would take. 

Netflix is mostly known for making their own shows, but they've also done their movies, as well. It is now well-known that the upcoming Narnia project will be an adaptation of The Magician's Nephew: which is the first book - chronologically - in the series' timeline, but ALSO one that hasn't been adapted yet. 

What I was initially hoping for when Netflix got the rights, and there was nothing happening beyond that, was this: a Narnia Netflix anthology series. 

Taking a page out of BBC's book, in the early 2000s - 2010s, BBC has done a few anthology-approached content. Sherlock by them, consists of about 3 episodes per season, yet each episode is around 60 - 90 minutes. I was hoping for that approach to be taken, covering all 7 books - and then some. 

Due to the longer-form TV/show format, it would've been a new approach. It would go 200% chronologically. So we'd start with the book, The Magician's Nephew, adapt it, and show some stuff that's mentioned off-page. For instance, maybe the first 20-30 minutes could've been about the downfall of Charn or something. Then, after that, but before we see anything from The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, it would be about how Narnia went from its state in The Magician's Nephew to how Lucy finds it when she first enters in The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Again, that could be a 'prologue' to the LWW portion of Netflix's Chronicles. But, it doesn't 'stop' there. As portions of LWW and The Horse and His Boy take place concurrently, perhaps those 'relevant' portions from HHB could 'leak' into the LWW portions. 

It would be a unique approach, giving us the 7 stories - and more. See part of the map where no story takes place? Let's do something with that. Prince Caspian takes place about 1,000 years after HHB ends? Lots of storytelling opportunity there. 

That is the approach or ambition I was hoping for when it was announced that Netflix was going to produce Narnia content. 

What are your thoughts on one, big, complete mini-series??    

If Greta Gerwig gets to do The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, who would people cast as The Beavers and Mr Tumnus? The cast for the 2005 for those characters are so wonderful, especially James McAvoy. They have to be British for me, especially The Beavers. My ideas are:

Mr Beaver: Billy Connolly
Mrs Beaver: Emma Thompson
Mr Tumnus: Joseph Quinn

This is just my personal ranking, based purely on how much I enjoy each book. I’m curious to see what other people’s are.

1 - The Horse and His Boy
2 - The Silver Chair
3 - The Lion, The With, and The Wardrobe
4 - The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
5 - Prince Caspian
6 - The Magician’s Nephew
7 - The Last Battle

IF YOU DISAGREE WITH ME THAT’S FINE, JUST BE NICE ABOUT IT.

I've seen resent debates on whether it matters if Aslan is male/female as well as other changes as to conform the message of the story to more modern sensibilities, morals etc.

I wanted to offer a small perspective on why perhaps C. S. Lewis made Aslan appear as masculine, and why a Christian as well as archaic cosmology uses the male symbolism for God. C. S. Lewis was a Christian after all, and was very interested in medieval history and older mythologies.

The archaic perspective is centered to a large degree on the direct human experience in relation to the outside reality, it's very phenomenological. If we observe males, he produces a seed that is able to grow inside the womb of a woman. This pattern is understood as a microcosm of the more fundamental macrocosmos, which consist of Earth and Heaven. From the sky comes water, which in Greek mythology is Uranus that rain his seed down on Earth, who acts as a womb for his seed.

So there's this consistent structure and logic which is being build upon, with the pattern expanding in ever more microcosms. God's law is also an image of seed, invisible but is able to grow inside the human consciousness.

In the Christian perspective and symbolism, God the Father is above the invisible Heaven, but acts through this higher reality from which seeds of life come down on earth. In the beginning, it's said earth was formless until God spoke. Meaning from his domain raised earth in a pattern that increases in complexity, forming a mountain on which paradise is set. It's the navel of where Heaven and Earth meet. This image is seen for example in Norse mythology, where Heimdal lives on top of the sky mountain. He bridges Midgaard to the heavenly domain by Bifrost.

The male isn't above the female in the sense that they are co-creating. From the invisible seed that contains all the wisdom for the pattern to evolve, it needs a womb that is able to physically express the idea. It's when invisible ideas/meaning meet with the tangible physical world. The physical is being shown great value from the incarnation of Jesus.

This might seem strange to modern materialism that has a completely different cosmology, that reduces everything to the physical only. But to archaic thinking, this worldview offers meaning at a hierarchy at many different scales, thus having a metaphysical dimension that gives meaning all the way down to our personal experience.

If we move away from this traditional way of seeing reality, we might miss some of its meaning. Perhaps both cosmologies, the spritiual and materialistic can co-exist. ​The femine nature is by the Catholic Church being expressed in the nature of Mary, who is taken to be the Mother of God, Jesus. As every human male (and female) should be thankful to their mothers for the life she produced, but also in thanks to their father who gave his seed.

I hope this made sense, otherwise what do you think?

Question: This might have been discussed before, but with the time shift of Magician's Nephew being set in the 1950s, does that imply the Pevensies will be set in the late 1970s/1980s? And then Jill Pole and Eustace appearing at the late 80s/early 1990s? I can certainly see why new adaptations would want that.

The version in the new trailer is first, the version in the old movies is second:

It’s been winter for 100 years by the events of LWW, and Tumnus talks about summers as if he’s experienced several, so he must be at least 120, right? What’s the average faun lifespan? Is he still relatively young for a faun?

I'm going to drop my thoughts on Aslan in the upcoming Nexflix film here. Take them with a grain of salt, it's just a movie, and it doesn't need to be life and death... :)

If I understand the Narnia text correctly, Aslan is not (primarily) an allegory of Christ, at least not at the highest level. But rather, Aslan is Christ as he appears in Narnia. Earth, the home of the humans, exists in the world, and so the stories of Narnia cannot be reduced to allegorical fiction. Now.. That said, Lewis absolutely does make heavy use of allegory within the stories, but the "Narnia-as-allegory" genre classification misses an important nuance in Lewis's literary imagination.

If, per Lewis, Aslan is Christ as he appears in Narnia (i.e., Narnian name), while it might be argued that Aslan needn't necessarily be imagined as male, it remains true that Lewis did, in fact, imagine Aslan as male. As many here have said, the Christian/Hebrew Bible uses a mix of masculine and feminine language to describe God. But the assumption that this somehow justifies an (apparent) feminized Aslan is, imo, misplaced.

In the Christian/Hebrew scripture, creation often operates as a structure of figurative language God uses to describe himself. It does not mean that the God of the Bible is ontologically gendered, and the most traditional understandings would acknowledge God as wholly transcendent of nature. But then, Aslan is not God, but specifically Christ. Importantly, Christ incarnate, whose humanity expresses itself as undoubtedly male. The God of Narnia might very well transcend gender, but Aslan's "Narnian nature" does not, just as, per Christian orthodoxy, Christ's humanity does not.

IMO, understanding Aslan, not just "religiously", but Christologically, ought to give us cause to conclude that the most faithful representation of Lewis's character in film would, at least in the way viewers and characters encounter him, be irreducibly male. If anything Lewis's affinity for neoplatonism would imagine Aslan as "more" male, not less or other.

Honeslty, I do not care that much that Meryl Streep is voicing the character. It's just a movie, and it's not like the book is being rewritten... However, I do wonder if stripping the character of its distinct Christological composition will, in effect, make Aslan less interesting, and devolve (potentially) into a generic and impersonal "voice of the universe". I hope not...

I saw the trailer for TMN, and even though I admit I'm not a fan of what I saw and I think it does not represent the real story written by Lewis, my theory about the decision to bring Streep to voice Aslan is not the full story.

My guess is that they are going to give Aslan a male voice for dialogue, and Streep is going to be the main voice for the music part. Something similar to what they did mixing voices in the DreamWorks 98 movie "The Prince of Egypt" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3829oXRaIAY

If you listen closely, God's voice is mixed with multiple voices, and there is a female voice echo. So I guess that Aslan is going to sound male, with an echo or whisper that is a female voice. And that it is going to be more noticeable during the song section.

I didn't like the concept or the general feel of the trailer, as it feels too futuristic and IDK, not whimsical. But here I'm guessing.

Written and drawn by me