Polly Toynbee’s now infamous op-ed diatribe against her straw man “Narnian brand” of Christianity in a recent issue of The Guardian is flawed, but not in the same way as the film that inspired her outrage. Polly misses the point alright, but not nearly as much as director Adamson in his adaptation of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. If anything, Adamson’s own branding of Narnia represents a far more insidious undermining of Lewis’ loose allegory than Toynbee’s distorted invective could ever aspire to be.


J.K. Rowling has spoken much about our propensity for sanitizing children’s literature. We don’t want things to be too scary, too unnerving, or too formative. Lewis would certainly agree with Rowling. In the book, the White Witch is a dreadful figure for children to encounter. She looms over the imagination with her wand of permanent Winter. But even more terrifying is Lewis’ Aslan, who for much of the book remains an imponderable myth to the Pevensie children. Essential to the narrative is the fact that even the White Witch believes in him, and trembles. This is precisely the point at which Toynbee balks. “He is pure, raw, awesome power,” she says.


But Adamson’s Aslan shouldn’t pose this problem to Toynbee. He isn’t nearly scary enough. Adamson undermines Narnia by playing with its delicate balances of power. His Aslan simply isn’t the sort of thing that his White Witch would ever be that scared of. Truth be told, it would take little effort to turn the quickly paced descriptions and dialogue of The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe into a screenplay. The film has been lauded for its faithfulness in this respect. But I guess adaptations are more than mere transposition of dialogue, they also involve the evocation of an author’s moral imagination.