I hate to say it, but I’m already sick of Narnia

Sarah Johnson Home Front
Are you sick of Narnia already, even before the opening of the Disney film adaptation of C S Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe? Some of us have been living with Narnia Overload Syndrome for years.
Four years ago a television series in which children remake their parents’homes was filmed in my house. As a result I have knocked myself senseless climbing in through the “wardrobe door” which replaced my two younger children’s bedroom door. It took three days to get rid of the fake snow. And if you too consider installing five trees, a lamppost and a full-size polystyrene Aslan the Lion, please think about storage space first.
I have never been forgiven for chucking out Aslan, so, for me both guilt and foreboding cast a sickly pall over the new film. The foreboding began when I saw an advertising poster for Narnia and McDonald’s – together. Glimpsing the gentle fantasy world of my childhood violated by a global burger bar put me off the idea of seeing the film at all, even though I hear Tilda Swinton is the definitive White Witch.
The foreboding grew: the McDonald’s connection is only one of a range of attempts to exploit the film commercially: one advertisement in America shows a child stepping through the wardrobe door to find her mother delightedly sniffing her fresh laundry.
But let’s look on the bright side: when the Guardian’s resident foam-flecked militant atheist Polly Toynbee takes against a project, it must have something going for it. And she absolutely loathes the Narnia film. “Of all the elements of Christianity,” she fumes this week, “the most repugnant is the notion of the Christ who took our sins upon himself and sacrificed his body in agony to save our souls.” Gracious – I always thought it was the Spanish Inquisition people didn’t like. What is “repug nant” about Christ’s sacrifice? “Did we ask him to?” Toynbee spits.
So that’s it! Actually, people had been looking for a Messiah for some centuries, though they did not get quite what they had expected. But that’s all eyewash to Toynbee – Christ has committed a massive faux pas, one which would get you ostracised in the smarter London suburbs – He dared to call round without ringing first! We never asked to be saved – and yet He had the cheek to go and do it anyway!
Yes, if the film gets up Polly Toynbee’s nose it cannot be too bad. But Toynbee may be right about one thing: she predicts that the evangelical marketing techniques which Disney is using to “sell” the film to a Christian audience will fall flat here in secular old Britain, because we do not really have a Christian audience to speak of.
Christian evangelists are hammering home the film’s Christian allegory, instead of allowing children to work it out for themselves. No chance, now, of the lovely story lying undisturbed in a child’s imagination for years, to come suddenly alive when the child encounters Christianity in adulthood – as Lewis had originally hoped.
I have a nasty feeling not that the film is going to exactly flop but that it will embarrassingly fail to equal its main rival in the Oxford fantasy stakes, The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Director Peter Jackson’s treatment of Tolkien was faithful, but at the same time gently nudged what had always been a story beloved of arrested adolescents and hippies into more adult territory and reached a broad audience.
By contrast, Narnia will always, however much souped up with special effects, remain a hand-painted, woodenscenery little place, with talking beavers instead of orcs and little girls with pigtails instead of Liv Tyler and Cate Blanchett. Have Disney taken on board that the audience will be smaller, in every sense? Teenage boys are not exactly clamouring to take tea with Mr Tumnus the faun. Yet males aged 14-25 form the core of the cinema-going public. It will be a very successful film by all standards – except those of the films it will be most often compared with. It cannot compete with Middle Earth, let alone the onward-rolling juggernaut of Harry Potter.
My fear is that Disney will therefore cancel plans to film the subsequent Narnia books, and the atheists will have a field day. I would be delighted to be proved wrong.