From Letters of Note, a letter of C.S. Lewis’ to BBC producer Lance Sieveking about the possibility of adapting his Chronicles of Narnia to the big screen:
The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
18 Dec. 1959Dear Sieveking
(Why do you ‘Dr.’ me? Had we not dropped the honorifics?) As things worked out, I wasn’t free to hear a single instalment of our serial except the first. What I did hear, I approved. I shd. be glad for the series to be given abroad.But I am absolutely opposed—adamant isn’t in it!—to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wd. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wd. be to me blasphemy. All the best.
Yours
C. S. Lewis
Presumably, he’s rolling in his grave.
May 7th, 2012 | 4:07 pm
Tolkien had much the same opinion about dramatic adaptations of his work, and I think he’s basically correct. Magic is all about incantation, and stories about magic require at the very least a literary if not a verbal incantation to bring them to life. The regrettable film adaptations of both LOTR and Narnia have justified the concerns of both authors well beyond reasonable doubt.
May 7th, 2012 | 4:17 pm
It seems like he was talking about the very old style of having the picture of a horse, for example, and human lips superimposed onto the photograph mouthing the words (think Mr. Ed). As you see in the letter, he has no similar objections to animation. I’d say today’s CGI is more akin to animation.
May 7th, 2012 | 4:18 pm
I must be reading the letter differently. It seems to me that he is referring to some type of costumed human, while opening the door to some type of creative method of representing talking animals. I think the idea of “CG” was pretty well out of old Clive’s mind when he wrote this letter.
I think the Narnia movies are splendidly executed – very well done.
May 7th, 2012 | 4:23 pm
At the risk of shifting the focus of this conversation, my first response to reading this letter was to wonder if Lewis’ objections to an anthropomorphic representation of Aslan as blasphemous could help us understand the objections of Muslims to representations of Mohammed. No, I am not endorsing violence by anyone, but blasphemy used to be a serious, even capital, offense in parts of Europe, so Lewis meant what he said quite seriously (not, I am sure, in the sense that he would have wanted to execute anyone). There have long been controversies within Christianity about proper and improper representations of Christ and the Saints.
Representations of Christ have other implications as well. For instance, the seemingly omnipresent blond hippie Jesus paintings kept me from taking Christianity seriously for a long time. But representations such as the Greek Orthodox Icons and Latin American folk representations of Christ and Mary drew me back in.
Whatever Lewis might have thought of the Narnia films, he probably would have had to concede that you could do a lot worse than Liam Neeson as Aslan’s voice actor.
May 7th, 2012 | 4:47 pm
And how about a McDonald’s toy with a lever that moves the lion’s mouth? Yuck.
May 7th, 2012 | 4:55 pm
The letter clearly is talking about a person in a lion suit. What else would he mean by “anthropomorphic lion?” Aslan is said to be a lion, a great and glorious lion, but a lion nonetheless. To the extent that the movies CGI looks like a real lion, they’re reflecting CSL’s vision.
May 7th, 2012 | 5:00 pm
There’s a lot of parlor game, “C.S. Lewis would have thought..” thinking here.
I don’t have any idea what he would have thought about the very recent CGI-type animation because it was pretty unthinkable in the 1950s-early 60s.
May 7th, 2012 | 5:07 pm
“Person in a lion’s suit” describes the Wonderworks version of the Narnia stories that aired on PBS what is it, maybe 25 years ago now? And that was fairly universally decried, except by the fan base that will swallow anything as long as it’s “wholesome.”
CG is a totally different thing. With CG, there’s nothing “anthropomorphic” about Aslan at all. He’s a lion, who looks like a lion, walks like a lion, and does everything like a lion except talk.
Lewis may have had some objection to filming a CG Aslan the way the recent Narnia movies did it, but it’s not to be found in the distinction being made in this letter.
May 7th, 2012 | 5:09 pm
BTW, the word “pantomime” is the clue here. “Pantomime” was the word of the era for people dressed up in animal suits for music hall type shows. Think two guys under a horse costume. Whatever he may have thought of the Liam Neeson version, this isn’t that.
May 7th, 2012 | 5:15 pm
Animals in CGI look buffoonish when they talk because animals do not have lips that move like ours. You must either add moving lips, which looks ridiculous, or have the animal speak just by opening and closing its mouth, which is surreal. When cartoon animals talk, of course, there is nothing jarring because there is no expectation of realism.
I’d like to think that C.S. Lewis, a sensible man if there ever was one, would have agreed with me on this.
May 8th, 2012 | 1:57 pm
Perhaps the underlying point is that there’s something special about reading that can’t be captured in a film. I’ve never enjoyed a movie in the same way as I’ve enjoyed the best books I’ve read. I think reading becomes a part of you because it so thoroughly engages your mind. While I like films, they don’t have that same quality for me. They exist outside of me while books have some kind of existence within me.
May 8th, 2012 | 4:41 pm
sally rogers — except that he had no objection to an animated version. So it wasn’t a general belief that visualizing the story had to be wrong.
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