The adaptation from the book, as mentioned, presents a faithful illustration of C.S. Lewis’ world of Narnia.  It also puts forth a genuine touch from the real world from which Pevensie’s come from, as the Luftwaffe terror bombs London in the opening.  These bombings force the mother to send her four children, Lucy (Georgie Henley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), and Peter (William Moseley), as so many others did during the World War II to the safety of the British countryside.  Nevertheless, to their dismay, the Pevensie children end up with a reclusive professor and his authoritarian housekeeper that demands utter silence and complete calmness.  To expect constant silence and calmness from children is suffocate children from experiencing childhood and the fabulous time of constant imagination – a time when C.S. Lewis familiarized himself with Beatrix Potter.

In boredom, the four children find different things to preoccupy their repressed presence in the Victorian home of Professor Kirke (Jim Broadbent).  One of the things is hide-and-seek, which leads the youngest of the four, Lucy, to hide in a wardrobe with fur coats.  However, the children’s game of hide-and-seek turns into an extraordinary adventure for Lucy who uncovers that the wardrobe is a portal to a fantasyland called Narnia.  She befriends a faun, also known as a satyr in Greek mythology, whose name is Mr.Tumnus (James McAvoy).  The notion of beware of strangers emits strong warnings in Lucy’s encounter with Mr.Tumnus, but it also teaches a lesson of friendship and trust.

Eventually, when Lucy returns she has been gone for several hours, but only a brief second has past in the real world.  A happily excited Lucy wants to share her discovery, but they find that the wardrobe is only a wardrobe and not a portal, which leads the other siblings to think that her imagination is working overtime in the boring house.  Nonetheless, the four siblings will eventually find a way into Narnia that will bring them on a suspenseful adventure of treachery, love, friendship, and many other righteous qualities.  Somehow, the lives of the four siblings are connected with the White Witch (Tilda Swinton), who has deceived the naïve Edmund, the younger brother, to bring his sisters and brother to her castle in false promises of Turkish Delight (sweets) and a throne.  The White Witch’s true intentions are to kill the siblings, as they pose a threat to her. Meanwhile, in the south, Aslan is returning with an army with which he will try to destroy the White Witch icy grip of Narnia, as she also hunts the siblings on their escape south.

Having read these books and in the light of recent year’s releases of the Lord of the Rings, the expectations for this film mounted.  It got to a point where slight apprehension and uneasiness emerged, as C.S. Lewis has provided some of the fondest memories from my childhood when reading these books late at night anticipating the next turn of events within the next page.  It is with joyfulness and excitement that I must say that Andrew Adamson captured the feeling of C.S. Lewis’ fantastic Narnia adventure.

The two dear friends J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis lived and worked in the same town where they share many conversations, as members of the Inklings, a University of Oxford discussion group.  They probably shared their thoughts about right and wrong, mythology, and society among many other topics.  They both were Christians, professors, writers, and creators of imaginary distant lands.  However, one of them was to become the greater while the other would live in the shadow of his friend.  This was the case with C.S. Lewis, as he never accomplished the equal greatness of J.R.R. Tolkien.  The stories of Tolkien are more fluent, detailed, and unique while Lewis’ stories emit a sense of familiarity, as they openly borrow elements from other cultures’ mythology.  It is the commonness of Lewis that ushers him into the shadow of Tolkien.

There is also, unfortunately, some slight awkwardness in how the four siblings behave in situations of high stress, as the psycho-emotional aspect of the film seems to suffer slightly.  However, C.S. Lewis’ book and the film present the children in the way he wished children to be, as quiet, obedient, and well-mannered miniature adults with a high level of curiosity and imagination.  On the other hand, Tilda Swinton performs, as the White Witch, with energetic charisma and radiating darkness and evil that completely contrasts the innocence of the four children.  The performances between the children and Tilda Swinton balance extraordinarily well and in the end, remove any of the possible cinematic discomfort between the characters.

Read in a Reuter article released by CNN, C.S. Lewis opposed his books shot in live-action while only allowing a reenactment in animated form.  However, ironically, I have a belief that he could not imagine the progress of cinematic technical achievement, which now can bring to life the creatures he visually generated in his mind.  The New Zeeland director Adamson takes on C.S. Lewis’ brain-baby with delicate care, as he shot the film in live-action while incorporating computer-generated imagery that erases the memories of the cartoon The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1979).  In the end, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe presents a wonderful cinematic experience, but it lacks authentic imagination that creates uniqueness and originality to elevate it to brilliant piece of cinema.

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