by Sandra Devera

Created on: July 06, 2010

While many children’s books do not have the sufficient stride to leap to film, Director Andrew Adamson’s version of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” is an excellent translation from C.S. Lewis’ original story to cinema. This may be due to co-producer Douglas Gresham being C.S. Lewis’ stepson and having a vested interest in protecting the spirit and intent of the story. Previous made for television video versions of the story have had their charms, the best being the 1998 version by the BBC using live action and animatronics, but it is not until the 2005 version distributed by Walt Disney Pictures and Walden Media that there has been the financial backing for the lavish special effects and costume/make-up design that the fantasy story requires.

Both movie and book versions of “The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe” describe the four Pevensie children, Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy, who enter the magical world of Narnia through a forgotten wardrobe. The “always winter, never Christmas” world of Narnia is being oppressed under the cruel rule of Jadis, the White Witch. It has been prophesied that four humans, two male and two female, would overturn the witch’s rule in favor of the true King of Narnia, Aslan the Lion. The Pevensie children quickly find themselves embroiled in the political, spiritual and magical battles of this world inhabited by talking animals, dryads, nyads, fauns, dwarves, and giants.

"The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was first published in 1950 and according to Lewis was based upon a single image that he had of a faun holding an umbrella and carrying packages in the snow. The main character is Lucy Pevensie and the book was dedicated to Lewis’ god-daughter Lucy Barfield. The story starts out in England of the 1940’s suffering under the German blitzkrieg of bomb attacks on urban areas. While the book does not dwell on the bombings of London, assuming even children reading the story in the 1950’s would have an awareness of such historical events, the 2005 film version has to show the bombings and the main characters barely fleeing in time to a bomb shelter to explain to modern children why it was necessary for the parents of London to send their children to strangers’ homes in the country. C.S. Lewis himself had temporarily housed three children during World War II at his home, The Kilns, outside of Oxford.

The other obvious modernization of the

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