Disney dumps Narnia!

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by cee2lee2

We just watched the movie last night (bought the DVD without all the extras). It was an OK movie, but it was not Prince Caspian. Then I reread the book this morning and was so disappointed thinking about the movie it could have been if the book had been followed more closely.

I hope the rest of the books get made into movies but if this is an example, I'd rather not go further. I"ll stick with my BBC videotapes.

It is quite shameful that a major movie studio couldn't do better at sticking to the books as the BBC series did. And they did it well. I still love the BBC Dawn Treader and Silver Chair. And if you ask me, there's no outdoing the Puddleglum in that version.

[cee2lee2]

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

And if you ask me, there's no outdoing the Puddleglum in that version.

Agreed! Tom Baker was gloriously glum!

[Varnafindë]

They made one major mistake about Puddleglum, though - at one point, the darkness of the cave and the Sunless Sea became too much for him and he had a nervous breakdown.

Marshwiggles do not have nervous breakdowns.

Misery doesn't become too much for them, because they have already anticipated it and been gloriously glum about it.

[Midge]

Ah.. apparently I am out of the loop here.. I have never seen the BBC Narnia films. Huh.

*loops a rope around the figmental neck of the Rule*

[Tessar]

You should really look into them, Midge... Maybe you'd be underwhelmed by them vs. today's tv shows with effects and such... But I really, really loved them as a kid, and I still do. To me, they're so much better than either of the Disney ones are... Really, really fun movies .

[hectorberlioz]

Yes, I grew up with them as well. Supposedly a BBC Horse and His Boy was made at some point, but they never showed it.

[cee2lee2]

Originally Posted by Tessar

You should really look into them, Midge... Maybe you'd be underwhelmed by them vs. today's tv shows with effects and such... But I really, really loved them as a kid, and I still do. To me, they're so much better than either of the Disney ones are... Really, really fun movies .

I agree, Midge. I never knew Narnia as a kid, first meeting the stories when I was in college. And it was after that that I saw the BBC shows. Even without all of the "special effects" the stories come through brilliantly.

[hectorberlioz]

Narniaweb.Com has some news about the Disney/Walden dispute. As I suspected, Disney was being irresponsible about the release date. The producer basically reiterates what we've discussed in this thread: release date, least-favorite Narnia book, etc. Here's the kicker line though...

"We also made a slightly more adult, darker story, and we shouldn't have."

Now they listen... Link here...

http://www.narniaweb.com/news.asp?id=2042&dl=21818770
http://www.narniaweb.com/news.asp?id=2042&dl=21818770

[Varnafindë]

Originally Posted by hectorberlioz

Now they listen... Link here...

http://www.narniaweb.com/news.asp?id=2042&dl=21818770
http://www.narniaweb.com/news.asp?id=2042&dl=21818770

I noticed that comment too - and the NarniaWebbers could have told them all along that they were making a mistake.
Tried to tell them, even.

[nasuada]

i myself like the movie alot!but i think they can team with a better studio then disney.i heard that they might go with twentieth century fox.and actually i reread the book after i watched the movie and they have alot of word for word in it,they follow the book pretty well.

[ayra]

The whole movie was a rip-off. IF they had followed the book and IF they had TRIED to do a good job on the characters and such, THEN they might have gotten not only a better movie, but a bigger audience.

The part about the witch scared my little sibs and I didn't like the battle in the castle b/c it was not in the book, it was sad, and it made peter and the rest of his family look like they had given up on Aslan. They tried a do-it-youselfer and it failed miserably.

As you can tell, I did not like the movie b/c I am a die-hard follow-the-book-if-there-is-one person.

[nasuada]

for the movie,they had to make it more exciting.i love the book and i love when movies follow the book,but they had to put some more action into it

[brownjenkins]

Lewis was never that much of a storyteller from a character sense, he was more thematic. That works fine among a reader base that identifies with your theme, but doesn't come across so well in movies.

Caspian was actually a decent movie... my kids liked it more than the first, and they haven't read any of the books, but it was untimately as shallow as the books are.

[inked]

Yeah, BJ, shallow enough to have sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages!

per wiki... (type in CS Lewis and have a go, old boy)...
"The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children and is considered a classic of children's literature. Written between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, the series is Lewis' most popular work having sold over 100 million copies in forty-one languages (Kelly 2006) (Guthmann 2005). It has been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage, and cinema."

on LWW...
"Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1]"

British Book Awards...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...sh_Book_Awards

and other signs of their shallowness that undoubtedly limit them in their appeal!



By the by, you ought to get a copy of PLANET NARNIA by Michael Ward and read it so as to further substantiate your allegation of shallowness by refuting it.

or, social commentary today by the Space Trilogy at
http://culture11.com/article/36137

or, The Magician's Book
(reviewed here http://www.narniafans.com/archives/1660) in which the shallow books read as a child still haunt the imagination of this person authroing a book in response to the shallowness.

I could go on but I shan't. You have to do some things for yourself.

[hectorberlioz]

Originally Posted by brownjenkins

Lewis was never that much of a storyteller from a character sense, he was more thematic. That works fine among a reader base that identifies with your theme, but doesn't come across so well in movies.

Well that's just nonsense, seeing as how successful the BBC versions were in translating book to screen.

[nasuada]

The Chronicles of Narnia are the best books in the world!they are not shallow.

[ayra]

To be honest, the movie was shallower, (if thats a word) than the book.
Peter and all the other main characters in the book were much different in personality and how they went about securing Caspian's throne from Miraz.

The book is good enough for adults to read and enjoy, not to mention kids read and understand. Which is not that easy to do in the same book.

[Alcuin]

JRR Tolkien to C. A. Furth at Allen & Unwin, his publishers, 13 May 1937, about publication in the United States and possible movie treatments of The Hobbit. This is from Letter 13 from Letters of JRR Tolkien.

It might be advisable ... to let the Americans do what seems good to them – as long as it was possible ... to veto anything from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).

[GrayMouser]

Originally Posted by inked

Yeah, BJ, shallow enough to have sold over 100 million copies in 41 languages!

per wiki... (type in CS Lewis and have a go, old boy)...
"The Chronicles of Narnia is a series of seven fantasy novels for children and is considered a classic of children's literature. Written between 1949 and 1954 and illustrated by Pauline Baynes, the series is Lewis' most popular work having sold over 100 million copies in forty-one languages (Kelly 2006) (Guthmann 2005). It has been adapted several times, complete or in part, for radio, television, stage, and cinema."

I'm not sure if I'd want to go on numbers of copies sold as a guide to depth...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...iction_authors

on LWW...
"Time magazine included the novel in its TIME 100 Best English-language Novels from 1923 to 2005.[1]"

Surprisingly good choices...Ubik, Neuromancer, Dog Soldiers, Snow Crash, The Sot-Weed Factor...

British Book Awards...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Categor...sh_Book_Awards

Yep, up there with Catherine Cookson, Spike Milligan and Michael Moore.

and other signs of their shallowness that undoubtedly limit them in their appeal!



By the by, you ought to get a copy of PLANET NARNIA by Michael Ward and read it so as to further substantiate your allegation of shallowness by refuting it.

or, social commentary today by the Space Trilogy at
http://culture11.com/article/36137

or, The Magician's Book
(reviewed here http://www.narniafans.com/archives/1660) in which the shallow books read as a child still haunt the imagination of this person authroing a book in response to the shallowness.

I could go on but I shan't. You have to do some things for yourself.

Of course, speaking of sales and awards, Phillip Pullman has sold 15 million copies in only ten years, and, for awards

The Amber Spyglass won the 2001 Whitbread Book of the Year award, a prestigious British literary award. This is the first time that such an award has been bestowed on a book from their "children's literature" category.

The first volume, Northern Lights, won the Carnegie Medal for children's fiction in the UK in 1995.[9] In 2007 the judges of the CILIP Carnegie Medal for children's literature selected it as one of the ten most important children's novels of the previous 70 years. In June 2007 it was voted, in an online poll, as the best Carnegie Medal winner in the seventy-year history of the award, the Carnegie of Carnegies[10][11].

The Observer cites Northern Lights as one of the 100 best novels.[12]

.......
On 25 May 2005 Pullman received the Swedish government's Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award for children's and youth literature (sharing it with Japanese illustrator Ryōji Arai).[13] Swedes regard this prize as second only to the Nobel Prize in Literature; it has a value of 5 million Swedish Kronor or approximately £385,000.

The trilogy came third in the 2003 BBC's Big Read, a national poll of viewers' favourite books, after The Lord of the Rings and Pride and Prejudice (the only entries in the "top ten" written before 1978).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/His_Dar...nd_recognition

Which you characterised as "notoriously" failing to compete....

And lest we forget, one fairly eminent critic who heartily shared brownjenkin's assessment was...Professor JRR Tolkien.

[hectorberlioz]

Actually the first two Pullman books were pretty darned good. Wonderful plot, lots of new imagery...it was the weird, twisted, preachy third one that made my stomach turn.