Aslan is on the move.

My wife and I did something we rarely do: we saw a film on the day of its debut. Disney’s screen version of C.S. Lewis’s “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” opened Friday, and we rushed to a matinee.

I couldn’t help myself: I have enjoyed a dual citizenship as a Narnian for many years. My children accompanied me on many expeditions there, and I’m planning a voyage there soon with my small grandchildren in the near future.

Frankly, I was concerned that the film might make a mockery of the treasure that is the Narnia series. For one thing, the Disney of today is, in my opinion, a pale shadow of what it once was.

I mean, how could the company that produced, say, the enchantment of Snow White and Pinocchio, which left my 5-year-old self in awe and wonder, also be responsible for the cynical and artistically inferior “Emperor’s New Groove”?

And when I learned that Andrew Adamson, the director of the admittedly funny but often vulgar “Shrek” was at the helm for Narnia, I wondered just which of the talking animals of Narnia would suffer from flatulence.

Then, too, there is evidence that Lewis himself would have had some reservations. A “newly discovered” letter, alleged to have been written by Lewis just four years before his death, indicates that he opposed a film version of Narnia.

Assuming that the letter is not yet another “Hooper Hoax,” we have Lewis suggesting that television versions of his talking animals, from Fledge to Aslan Himself, would result in “buffoonery or nightmare.” And, he added, a “human pantomime version of Aslan” (picture a Narnian counterpart to Bert Lahr as the lion in “The Wizard of Oz”) would be “blasphemy.” The film thus seems to have run the risk of making Lewis turn over in his grave.

But I stood in the churchyard at Headington Quarry just weeks ago, and there were no signs that his rest was anything but peaceful. Nor need it be.

The film positively honors the book and its author. Indeed, asked whether Lewis would have approved of the film, Douglas Gresham, Lewis’s stepson, replied, “This would be beyond Jack’s wildest dreams.”

But for a few forgivable liberties (for example, the details of the children and beaver’s flight from the White Witch and her canine henchmen), the film is remarkably true to the book, right down to the dead blue-bottle fly on the windowsill.

Like the recent film versions of Tolkien’s Rings trilogy, the casting is remarkable.

If you have come to know the Pevensie children from reading and rereading the book, you might find yourself wondering how Gail Stevens, the casting director, managed to find the very Lucy who, until now, had lived only in your own mind.

And I find it remarkable that my Mr. Tumnus is the same faun that resided in Adamson’s mind as he read the books as a child.

Far from “buffoonery or nightmare,” the film crew’s creation of some 23 different Narnian species, from minotaurs and minoboars to giants and dwarves, to talking beavers, wolves and foxes, is astonishing and very believable.

And then there is Aslan.

I’m in over my head as I attempt to speak of the technology – some combination of a thing called animatronics along with computer imaging – that produced the Lord of the whole wood.

Adamson himself said, “I really wanted the children not to think it was a puppet.” Indeed. This would have been “blasphemous.” He added, “I didn’t want them to think for a moment it was just a prop, but to react as if it was right out of the zoo.”

The director underestimates himself. Aslan is not a tame lion, you see. Neither the Aslan who emerges from the pages of the book nor the screen version of Narnia’s King, who first appears from his splendid pavilion, is the sort of animal who might be kept in captivity.

Somehow, this computer-generated figure has weight: the very ground trembles as he walks. And he is fierce: his deafening roar is the undoing of even the arrogant and powerful Jadis. And he is wise: you can see that in his eyes. And he is good.

Aslan is very good.

Indeed, perhaps the most remarkable thing about the film is that it manages to do something that makes the books themselves remarkable: it evokes a fierce allegiance to Aslan and all that he stands for.

Here I am, a man of nearly 50, who prides himself at being rather tough-minded and analytical, falling in love with a character of fiction from a children’s story. Like the Pevensie children, at the name of Aslan, something seems to jump inside of me. Like the Cabby in “The Magician’s Nephew,” “I feel somehow, if I may make so free, as ‘ow we’ve met before.”

There is much talk these days of the Narnia series as a “Christian allegory.” There is perhaps some basis for this assessment.

But Lewis himself resisted such a characterization of the work. The stories are much less an attempt to allegorize the gospels than they are designed to acquaint readers with the Deep Magic that underlies the gospel stories themselves.

As Lewis saw it, Western society — perhaps British readers in particular — had become jaded and numbed to the Christian themes of good and evil, redemption and self-sacrificial love.

But those themes themselves, removed from an overtly Christian context, are soul-stirring and transformational.

Seeing them afresh, with centuries of encrusted assumptions and biases stripped away, the reader is permitted to respond directly to those themes.

There isn’t a child in the world who, having been drawn to Aslan, is not heartbroken over what transpires at the Stone Table, and elated over what happens next.

And if our own world is ruled by a King, Who would pay such a ransom to save us from our own treacheries, then we owe Him our undying devotion and allegiance.

Perhaps the magic has returned to the Magic Kingdom. But this is perhaps “a magic deeper still.” Merry Christmas! Long live the true King!

Mark Linville
linville (at) bellsouth.net

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