Since The Lord of the Rings’ success, there have been many fantasy films released to try to cash in on the success. I think it’s a breath of fresh air, as far as movies are concerned. After all, movies are mostly fantasy anyway, depending on how you look at them. Recently, Peter Jackson has optioned a series called Temeraire.

Adding to that list, according to The Hollywood Reporter, Warner Brothers has picked up the rights to a soon to be released children’s novel by James A. Owen called “Here, There Be Dragons.”

Says The Hollywood Reporter: The book brings together three strangers — John, Jack and Charles — in London during World War I, where they become entrusted with the Imaginarium Geographica, an atlas of all the lands that have ever existed in myth and legend, fable and fairy tale. They end up traveling to the Archipelago of Dreams, fighting the dark forces that threaten two worlds. It is later revealed that the three are future fantasy authors J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis and Charles Williams, who met in real life at Oxford and enjoyed a competitive friendship.

“It’s the ultimate story behind the story,” screenwriter David Goyer said of the project’s fictional treatment of the famed authors. “Very few people really know what they were like. They had really colorful lives, enough so you could tell straight biographies on them. By doing it this way, you get to have your cake and eat it too.”

“What sets it apart is that there’s a real quid pro quo between our world and their world and how events in the other world shape events our world,” he said. “Also, we get to cherry-pick the best public domain legends that exist, from the Homeric myths to tales like ‘The 7th Voyage of Sinbad.’ In this world, each island is a different fantasy world — it’s the mother lode of all that fantasy. And we get to have fun to see how Tolkien and Lewis got their inspiration. It just seemed like a no-brainer.”

Said Harry Potter producer: David Heyman: “The odd thing is, I’m not a fantasy fan. What drew me was that these characters are appealing and relatable and that the adventure takes place in a wholly conceived world. This is the place where all our stories come from, and the death of imagination equates to bad things happening to our world, which is such a beautiful idea.”

Heyman said he wants to fast-track “Dragons” even as he sees himself working on wrapping up the “Potter” movies for the next three or four years.

As far as the movie is concerned: WB is holding on to it as a project for Harry Potter producer David Heyman and Batman Begins screenwriter David Goyer to produce.

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We’ve just posted the ninth edition of the NarniaFans Mailbag. We’ve answered seven letters this week, including such topics as the age of Prince Caspian and ages of the actor they may cast for, and more!

Click here for the ninth NarniaFans Mailbag!

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Another Casting Call has appeared on StarsInMyEyes:

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian will reunite most of the principal cast from The Chronicles of Narnia : The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe. Prince Caspian finds the Pevensie siblings pulled back into the land of Narnia, where a thousand years have passed since they left. The children are once again enlisted to join the colourful creatures of Narnia in combating an evil villain who prevents the rightful Prince from ruling the land.

Shooting is scheduled to begin at end of January 2007 in New Zealand and Europe. At present submissions are ONLY required for the following roles : Males of Spanish or Mediterranean descent aged 30 to 60; female of Spanish or Mediterranean descent aged late 30s – all must be proficient speakers of English. Also sought are actors of restricted growth, male and female.

According to this listing, they’re filming in New Zealand, once again! Let’s hope that this is true!

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While Aslan flat-out IS Jesus Christ, many other characters in the Narnian stories can be called _analogies_ to something in the Bible. However far his inventiveness ranged, Mr. Lewis did not forget about Scripture. I was almost finished writing a fairly detailed article on this topic, when my treacherous computer chose to delete all my work for no reason. (Maybe Mr. Lewis and his brother weren’t so bad off using a manual typewriter after all.) Now it’s late at night and I’m tired; so I’ll shortcut salvaging the article by a minimal restatement of the correlations I’d listed.

1) Athaliah, daughter of Jezebel: parallel to Jadis, sharing the Witch’s willingness to murder children for the sake of power.

2) Balaam, the dubious prophet whose donkey was the only ordinary animal in the Bible that spoke: some parallel to Uncle Andrew, since Uncle Andrew’s contact with talking animals was part of the sequence of events which offered him s chance of redemption.

3) The Apostle Thomas: Puddleglum. Neither of them _wanted_ an unhappy outcome, even though both _expected_ one, and both were loyal at heart.

4) Nehemiah, a man who was not granted explicit miracles but set an example of integrity as he came from far away to clean up Jerusalem: parallel to King Caspian arriving at the Lone Islands and cleaning up the government there.

5) The spoiled, selfish sons of the mediocre priest Eli in First Samuel: parallel to the ape Shift, who only grew more selfish the more the donkey Puzzle gave in to his demands.

Joseph Richard Ravitts (pronounced RAY-vitts)

http://ut-fidem-praestem.blogspot.com

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Has anybody here ever heard of a famous live-stage director named Stanislavsky? He is best remembered for a book titled “An Actor Prepares,” which was the main textbook in an acting course I took long ago. Stanislavsky begins by telling a humorous anecdote at his own expense.

He relates that he was planning to portray the title role in Shakespeare’s “OTHELLO.” That character being a dark-skinned Moor, Stanislavsky says that he took pains to darken his own skin. He furthermore devised a Moorish-looking costume with a turban, and obtained a Muslim-style scimitar for himself to brandish. But he is inviting the reader to laugh at him for missing the point entirely. He should have been thinking about Othello’s _personality_ –how he dealt with issues of jealousy, prejudice, etc.

Dilettante fantasy writers who think they can imitate Mr. Lewis, or Mr. Tolkien, frequently fall into the same error. They concentrate on the external trappings–monsters, magic, swords, castles, etc.–and perhaps even pride themselves on having _more_ of these externals than are seen in the Narnian tales. But they miss the spirit; they fail to say anything nearly so deep as Mr. Lewis’ work said about faith, love, honor and sacrifice. They settle for Othello’s turban and scimitar without exploring the motivation.

Much of what is written by wanna-be’s is empty calories, but at least is not written in malice. What’s worse is when authors appeal to the externals of high fantasy–and use them for promotion of a definite message, but one which happens to be disastrously WRONG.

Decades ago, the Hildebrandt Brothers, along with a little-known co-author, undertook to write an epic titled “URSHURAK.” It absolutely creaked under the weight of all the externals piled into it, with elves and wizards and so on; but it was not only cinema-like flash with no idea content. The problem WAS its idea content: it was promoting that tired old brand new latest thing, New Age-style pantheism. All is one, and everything is everything else. As a history major, I can tell you that civilizations depending on some form of all-is-one pantheism NEVER EVER come up with a constitutional, representative form of government UNLESS they are influenced by Judeo-Christian civilization. And where Judeo-Christian civilization renounced slavery long ago, slavery is still officially allowed TO THIS DAY in some societies with a pantheistic worldview. This is no accident. If everything is everything else, you just can’t sustain an enthusiasm for distinguishing between good and evil.

Pantheism was the fly in the ointment for me in the otherwise outstanding TV series “BABYLON 5.” When the “wise” alien heroine Delenn gave her supposedly profound speech about all of us equally being “star stuff,” I wanted to jump into the story and say to her: “Have you _really_ thought about the implications of what you’re saying? If everyone and everything really belongs in the same undifferentiated cosmic stew, then there is NO reason why you should not be just as happy marrying a duckbilled platypus, or some similar creature from your own planet, instead of the hero of the series. Monistic philosophies inevitably saw off the branch on which all morality sits!”

I may seem to have strayed from the theme I began with; but “BABYLON 5″ is also an example of taking high-fantasy externals while failing to embrace the Judeo-Christian thinking in which high fantasy has its true roots. Joseph Michael Straczsinsky, creator of that series, made his Tolkienian tastes obvious when he established a band of heroes called Rangers, and gave the name “Lorien” to a super-duper space alien; but he parted company with Mr. Tolkien on the things that really matter. To give credit where due, Straczsinsky did treat Christian characters with more courtsey and understanding than a Gene Roddenberry would ever do; but he still gave his allegiance to pantheism, which is absolutely incompatible with the gospel of Jesus Christ.

I can just hear the chorus now, yelling at me: “You’re saying no fantasy can be any good unless it’s Christian! You’re calling for censorship!” No, I’m NOT calling for censorship. In our Biblically-based culture (as opposed to Marxist or Islamist societies), you’re allowed to write any kind of story you like. But I have equal freedom to critique the worldview and its implications for life.

http://empowered-anti-nonsense.blogspot.com

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There are Narnia fans, on the explicitly Christian side of the house, who are just a little uneasy about elements in the recent movie which seemed, if only slightly, to diminish Aslan’s status as Deity. To them I would say, “Have confidence in Douglas Gresham’s hand at the helm.” I believe that Mr. Gresham, and those who pay heed to him, are trying to be diplomatic about Aslan’s identity as Christ. What I mean by that–what I believe they have in mind–is something with Scriptural precedent.

Some Christians have wondered why the Lord Jesus, in His earthly life, allowed thirty or more years to go by before He began His ministry and His miracles. I believe that it was because He did not intend, once beginning His public ministry, to use His power as a spiked club to frighten people into submission. Since God the Father (also known to some of us as the Emperor-Over-Sea) wanted to leave space for men’s free will, Jesus needed something besides force and fear to gain a hearing for Himself. What He needed was an earned REPUTATION for purity and goodness, which would make it hard for false accusations of immorality to stick. And in the environment of normal human life, it takes the passing of time to acquire a solid favorable reputation.

When, in my Navy career, I was stationed in Japan with my first wife Mary (who now dwells in Aslan’s country), we joined with many other Americans in aggressively cultivating friendships among the local Japanese. We attended events of theirs, and invited them to events of our own. This went on for the three years I was assigned there. Near the end of that tour, we heard news of a horrible rape committed in Okinawa by three American servicemen. As far as I could tell, none of the Japanese in our area changed their feelings toward us; they had cause to realize that we were NOT like those three traitors. (I say traitors, for their offense against the host country was also injurious to their own country, and they deserved to hang for it.) Our years of reaching out had paid off; but knowing that a small negative can sometimes cancel out many positives, I suspect that all the good we had done was only _just_ enough to prevent us from being hated along with the wrongdoers. Mere passive harmlessness on our part in the preceding years would not have protected us.

Thus with our Savior. He knew that He would be insituations where adversaries would be itching to contrive a plausible accusation against Him; so He prepared for this by piling up decades of indisputable, undeniable goodness in His conduct of life. He was going to have to rub men the wrong way eventually, but his earned reputation would help Him to choose His time to do it.

This brings us back to the strategy of the Narnia films. Mr. Gresham has said that Christians should not think thatthe stories belong only to them; but since he is a Christian himself, and since he knows that his stepfather DID intend Aslan to be recognized as Jesus, he certainly does not mean that we must acquiesce to some of the blatant (and silly) non-Christian interpretations that are being given to Narnia since the movie came out. Rather, Mr. Gresham wants to widen the circle to invite more seekers in. For this reason, he doesn’t want to grab secular moviegoers by the collar prematurely and say to them, “Aslan is Jesus, and you have to accept Him, so get down on your knees!” That would not enlarge the audience for “Prince Caspian.” If the film series can be kept going, there will in the end be no way for viewers NOT to realize Who Aslan is. But we have to get them to stick with us. As Jesus in our world built His reputation for virtue first, so His imagined alternate form of Aslan must first accumulate such a reputation.

Let me review now the points at which the L-W-W screenplay did seem to diminish Aslan’s divinity. Although I defend the moviemakers’ motives, this doesn’t mean that I would have made the same choices if I’d been in charge.

(1) Soon after Peter has been introduced to Aslan, Aslan reveals that He knows Peter’s name and hometown; but then, the remark about Mr. Beaver makes it seem as if Aslan might have merely picked up information from the Beavers, rather than knowing it by omniscience. This is left ambiguous.

(2) In the same dialogue, Aslan speaks of the Deep Magic as “greater than all of us.” This is a more serious point, since it makes Aslan sound like a mere created being. Now, we know that the Deep Magic is really the providential will of God the Father; we can reconcile the “greater than” by comparing it to Jesus in John’s Gospel saying “–the Father is greater than I.” Jesus is as truly God as are the Father and the Holy Spirit, but it is true that the Father holds leadership within the Trinity. The “damage” from this handling of the Deep Magic concept is also reduced by having Aslan say to the White Witch, “I was there when it was written.”

(3) I don’t like it that the Emperor-Over-Sea is not mentioned at all. Acknowledging Him (God the Father) would have helped with item (2); but then, of course, they would have had to reveal that Aslan was the Emperor’s Son, which would be the same as shouting, “Yes, Aslan is Jesus!”

(4) When Aslan springs on Jadis before she can kill Peter, He doesn’t kill her instantly. The moviemakers, in comments on the DVD, said that they made this change from the book because killing the Witch instantly would seem like taking revenge in mere anger; they said that the moment’s pause before Aslan bites her head off gives it more dignity, a sense of destiny. I don’t agree at all. The
necessity of saving Peter would be enough justification for killing Jadis in one stroke, without seeming vindictive; to me, if anything, it makes Aslan look _more_ vindictive to stand over her as if gloating before He finishes her off.

(5) In the same scene, when Jadis finds herself pinned helplessly under Aslan’s claws, she doesn’t show resignation to her fate until she has first tried to retrieve her dropped sword and found it out of reach. This allows viewers who don’t know better to infer that it would have made some
difference if she _had_ been able to reach it. Of course, anyone who knows about her flinging of the iron bar at Aslan’s head in “The Magician’s Nephew” can dismiss that thought. Now, the writers didn’t want the scene to become something ugly, like scenes of unfortunate minor characters vainly struggling in the clutches of man-eating lions in the old Tarzan movies; but since it was unthinkable for Jadis to beg for mercy, they had to show some hint of the will
to resist, so a futile grab for her sword served. I still think Aslan should have just killed her instantly; but that would have deprived Tilda Swinton of her final close-up shot.

(6) When the four Pevensies are crowned, and Aslan says “May your wisdom grace US–” that sounds as if Aslan Himself, as much as any ordinary Talking Animal, somehow needs to be taught and led by the children. In case you missed your Sunday school lessons, the Almighty does _not_ need our advice or instruction.

If I’d been in charge, I would have altered all of these points in favor of magnifying Aslan’s attributes as Deity. But none of them prevents the writers from being able to let Aslan’s true nature “come gradually into focus,” as Mr.
Lewis would put it, in subsequent movies. We would be foolish to withdraw our support over these fairly trivial complaints. In a time when Calormenish forces in society are trying to censor and silence _every_ outlet for the gospel, we would be shooting ourselves in the foot if we didn’t give the benefit of the doubt to this vitally important cinema project.

Meanwhile, as individuals leading our daily lives in a less romantic world, we need to be doing the same thing our Savior did in His NON-fictional incarnate life prior to His public ministry. We need to be practicing righteous
conduct, so as to bring no dishonor to the name of God. Just imagine if, next year, some agnostic were to come out of the premiere of “Prince Caspian” feeling deeply moved, and ready to give a fair hearing to real-world Christian testimony–only to run into some professed Christian who affronts him with rude, selfish behavior. What a loss! What a failure to have to answer for!

You know what? If more Christians were making a serious effort to walk the walk, maybe Mr. Gresham would not have felt a need to chide us that Narnia does not only belong to us–because he would not be afraid of us casting discredit on the intent of his stepfather’s work.

Yours in the Grace of Jesus,
Joseph “Copperfox Amadeus” Ravitts

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Here’s a hardbacked activity book that has the polished look and feel of a classic bedtime storybook. It covers all the stories in the Chronicles of Narnia series – but with a slight bias towards The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe.

It includes some lovely full-page illustrations from the 2005 film and activities including word searches, crosswords, dot-to-dot, pictures to colour and code-breaking.

I have to confess that I did find it slightly uncomfortable to let my seven-year-old loose with crayons and pencils on such a beautiful hardbacked book. But he had no such reservations and loved it.

There is enough reading to keep six to eight-year-olds challenged – and if you are buying for a child who’s a reluctant reader, the mix of things to do and things to read might motivate them.

Particularly impressive were the imaginative spin-off ideas such as thoughts around the evacuation of children in World War Two and some information about author CS Lewis with examples of real letters he wrote to young fans of his books. There is also a lovely idea for an activity based around film storyboarding.

Published by Harper Collins RRP £6.99

Reviewed by Elaine Pritchard, mother-of-two

Click to buy: The Chronicles of Narnia: Activity Book

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We’ve just posted the eighth edition of the NarniaFans Mailbag. We’ve answered ten letters this week, including such topics as casting, possible new director for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and more!

Click here for the eighth NarniaFans Mailbag!

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Travellers looking for the elusive Narnia should hop on a flight to Belfast and seek out clues at the CS Lewis Festival this winter.

Held between December 7th and 10th, the event celebrates the life of one of the most famous children’s authors in the world.

The writer was born in Ballyhackamore in the eastern part of Belfast and spent his early years in the city.

First held to commemorate last year’s film release of The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, the festival was so successful that the city council decided to hold it again in 2006.

During the 2005 festival, a number of events appealing to CS Lewis fans of all ages were held, including storytelling, workshops, talks, tours and a lantern parade featuring drummers, puppets, dancers and more.

A similar programme of events is expected for this year’s festival.

For more information, see the official Belfast tourism website.

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A book is hitting shelves next week that could explore the territory that the filmmakers have been walking. The artwork is right out of the first film, with alterations that could very well be from concept art for Prince Caspian (it is late enough in the year for most of the art to be completed). Here is the book in question:

The Return to Narnia: The Rescue of Prince Caspian

Forum member Lioness_Aslan wrote: Hey this is Lioness_Aslan from the forum. This morning I checked my e-mails and found an Amazon.com one. It said that there was this new book called The Return to Narnia: The Rescue of Prince Caspian. I thought that maybe they had changed the books name but I realised that this was not yet released and it was the Hardcover. I don’t know if I’m the last one to notice this but just to let you know about it. Here is the amazon link.

The description of the book: In this thrilling full-color picture book, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy return to Narnia for the first time since The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to help Prince Caspian in his fight for the throne.

- Reading level: Ages 4-8
- Hardcover: 32 pages
- Publisher: HarperCollins (September 26, 2006)
- Language: English
- ISBN: 0061131105

Will this give us clues as to the structure of the story, as it will appear on film? We’ll have to wait and see.

UPDATE 1: Narnia Spy Stephen sent us this: Hi there. I just saw your story about the artwork (Matthew Armstrong’s) for the upcoming PC picture book. I can say that it isn’t any sort of PC concept art, it’s the artist’s own illustrations loosely based on visual ideas from the first movie. The book has already been advertised for quite a while and isn’t really anything to do with the upcoming movie. It’s a summarised version of PC, just like the picture book that was produced based on the story of LWW. There is a second picture book based on PC that will be coming out as well. So nothing as exciting as movie related stuff, unfortunately.

[Order The Return to Narnia: The Rescue of Prince Caspian (Hardcover) from Amazon.com]

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