Mark Brumley at Ignatius Insight Scoop also offers insight about Lewis' views about translating Narnia onto the screen. Excerpt:
Now, is it correct to say that Lewis opposed a screen adaptation of the Chronicles of Narnia? Yes and no. He speaks against a TV version of The Magician's Nephew and therefore, we can suppose, of the rest of the books. What he says of a TV version would seem to apply to film treatments as well--at least film treatments that would have been possible in Lewis' day--with the exception, Lewis implies, of a possible animated version by Disney. "Cartoons," as he notes, wld. [would] be another matter."
Lewis' reason for rejecting TV and by implication film versions of Narnia had to do with the way Lewis thought the depiction of the animal characters would come off using "photography". He could not have envisioned the kind of computer generated characterizations Disney is using to render The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe or the special effects used to create Lewis' friend Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings.
Can we say, then, that Lewis would have approved of a CGI version of Aslan? Not necessarily. But we can say that the principle he gave for opposing a film depiction of one of his Narnia stories doesn't, given modern technology, now preclude producing films of the Narnia stories.
My earlier post on the same subject.
