The wardrobe awaits… Posted by Hello

See Aslan. Hear Aslan Roar.

My thoughts:

Looks like the big, Lord of the Rings-style treatment, alright.

And it’ll make crowds happy. The crowd of fans who watched it with me at Biola a few weeks ago went berzerk and demanded an encore performance. So the fans are going to be happy, generally.

But…

… it also looks to me like a movie directed by a guy who usually directs cartoons. (And it is.) Mrs. McCready’s line delivery seems over-the-top. And the animation–especially Aslan–looks good, but also rather simple and, well, a little too perfect to be real, if you know what I mean. It’s very obvious to me, watching this, which parts are animated and which are actual people in costumes.

On the other hand, I had hoped that the Narnia films would feel more like films for children than the Lord of the Rings films, because the Narnia books are much more suited to children than the Lord of the Rings books. Narnia stories always felt simpler, to me, more like fables, stories that shouldn’t be illustrated with too much detail and realism. Middle-Earth, on the other hand, deserved the dusty, gritty, elaborately real detail that Jackson lavished upon it.

It’s still early, so I certainly won’t judge the film before I’ve seen it. I’ll just say that the trailer is at once thrilling and worrisome, making me desperately hope that this will be a case of a movie vastly exceeding the expectations set by the trailer.

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