The web's best Catholic reviewer discusses Narnia. Two excerpts worth noting:
1. Though widely referred to as “allegories,” the Narnia stories are actually something different. Real allegory, like Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, uses each character, place and event to represent something else. The Chronicles don't do this. Lucy and Mr. Tumnus aren't symbols for anything; they're characters in a story. No effort to create anything like an answer key or legend drawing one-to-one relationships from the wardrobe, the lamp-post, or even the Stone Table to anything in the Christian faith could possibly do justice to these evocative little tales.
Even Aslan himself, the great Lion and Narnia's true King, though commonly described as a “Christ figure,” isn't really an allegorical or symbolic representation of Jesus – because he's actually much more than that. Literarily, Aslan is nothing less than an imaginary portrayal of the very Divine Person known in our world as Jesus Christ, appearing in another world as the Lion Aslan.
2. After years of chilly relationships between Hollywood generally – and Disney in particular – and certain segments of American Christendom, LWW could represent at least a partial thawing. For Christians who've felt for years that Hollywood wasn't willing to acknowledge their existence, Disney's church-based overtures may be a welcome sign of change. For their part, Disney executives must surely be delighted to have a film, or even a franchise, with the potential to bring in even viewers previously determined to avoid anything with a Disney logo.
At the same time, religious considerations have to matter to Hollywood not just in the marketing process, but in the creative process. Filmmakers don't need to share the religious views of a Lewis or a Tolkien to adapt their works, but they do need to be willing to try to understand and honor the relationship of those views to the work. If that ever caught on, the thaw might become a springtime.
