It is unlikely that the opening screening of “Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, The/ (2005) in the new Cinema Formula at Michurinsky was poor. On the contrary, everything is seen, everything is heard. Only the film, which grossed 65.5 million in its first weekend at home, caused persistent bewilderment here for most. “Where’s the money, Zin?” where did the 180 million budget go? Director Andrew Adamson after “Shrek” (2001) and “Shrek 2” (2004) is unlikely to stoop to pocket theft, and on the surface it looked that way. Only professional necessity forced the birth of a second thought on this movie.
A still from “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Magic Closet.”
The girl Lucy, instead of the former Alice, finds herself in a magical land where eternal winter reigns. Then her older sister and two older brothers go there with her. One of the brothers is bad, which immediately throws the children into conflict between the evil White Witch and the population of the frozen Narnia, to which the big, kind Aslan the Lion rushes to help. How the conflict is resolved after the children meet Aslan does not need to be explained, though in fact it does not need to be explained just from memory. There are glimpses of England with bombings, an old mansion with an oak closet, forests in the snow with shacks and a castle, a sudden greening of the entire frame, a faun, a dwarf, talking beavers, foxes, wolves, various monstrous abominations, a shaved lion, but this is only a glimpse, and even chases with battles are flashed for a tick. Instead of normal fairy tale adventures in a normal fairy tale world in the film everything turned out cardboard and bushy, as if it was filmed forty years ago, when the limit of dreams was our “Snow Queen”.
The background itself is okay, but all the time – like a backdrop in a country club. The girl Lucy is also okay (Georgie Henley), Tilda Swinton is all White, Aslan is a lion, the beavers look like beavers, but the figures are also cut out on the edge and glued to the background. Not even the fact that they talk to each other, let alone the overall feel, inspires confidence. The adventures are inhibited by an aversion to the whole, and when shown at length, it’s as if they don’t happen at all. Well, the closet, the forest, the dam, well, the Front Porch. One can only consider who did the special effects. Let us suppose that the goat legs of Tumnus the faun were drawn by those who worked on King Kong (2005), the bombing of England is the handiwork of Star Wars artists, the castle is inherited by Harry Potter, the battle with the abomination is in Lord of the Rings. Let the accusation of pocket theft be dismissed with this: the special effects for The Chronicles of Narnia were done by ten of the world’s best movie companies. But an accusation of profanity is born. A complete lack of storytelling, including a lack of humor and interest, is what happens when Andrew Adamson has gone out of his way to do his own thing.
For one thing, his “Shrekies” are precisely cartoons, which, with all the gimmicks, provided perception. In “The Chronicles of Narnia,” the obvious mistake was to include too many living creatures in the cartoon, and even more heterogeneous ones (humans, beasts plus magical creatures). They simply did not fit together in style, because the background is also half-animated, half-living. Nothing “bigger” or “more mainstream,” unlike, for example, Looney Tunes: Back in Action (2003) or Stuart Little’s. Where’s the common denominator? The computers didn’t pull it off. But they brazenly kicked it out anyway, and that’s to the detriment of everything at once: story, meaning, and memory.
Of course, his humor was not much, and when reading The Chronicles of Narnia, it was always a bit of a drag, because Lewis was a Christian moral philosopher. Nevertheless, the tales are really modern, all children doctor prescribed. In creating a magical world, albeit one that became an allegory of Christian myth, Lewis was precisely writing “chronicles. In his books, everything is very brief, instantly passing millennia, the world is described on the dotted line, thanks to which the combination of people with talking beasts and fairy tale monsters in a magical nature, then real life does not interfere, does not destroy the idea, but interests. Besides, he chronicles exactly what he “told”: “Ah, children, I hope that none of you reading this book were as miserable as Lucy and Susan were at that sad moment.
The main literary value of “The Chronicles of Narnia” is its rare simplicity. A movie built on computer technology, three-story combinations, and the hope of winning because of its complexity has completely ruined it. There’s nothing left. The youngest kids will still get a kick out of it-but only to preschoolers and first graders. Still, everything turns, the lion comes to life, and simple children become kings in long dresses. The unpleasant thing is that, while pleasing only the littlest ones, whom you can’t let into the theater alone, the movie will automatically make the parents go with them and pay for everything, and endure the boredom and ridiculousness.