Comments on: Anthropomorphic Aslan is a Blasphemy

By: pentamom

pentamom — Tue, 08 May 2012 20:41:11 +0000

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.

By: sally rogers

sally rogers — Tue, 08 May 2012 17:57:47 +0000

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.

By: Mark

Mark — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:15:47 +0000

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.

By: pentamom

pentamom — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:09:41 +0000

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.

By: pentamom

pentamom — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:07:35 +0000

“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.

By: Steve Billingsley

Steve Billingsley — Mon, 07 May 2012 21:00:11 +0000

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.

By: Stephen P

Stephen P — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:55:04 +0000

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.

By: MikeinCT

MikeinCT — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:47:13 +0000

And how about a McDonald’s toy with a lever that moves the lion’s mouth? Yuck.

By: Peter S

Peter S — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:23:45 +0000

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.

By: AF Zamarro

AF Zamarro — Mon, 07 May 2012 20:18:16 +0000

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.