The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe (DVD, 2006, English, French, Spanish DVD Widescreen)

Is there anything more exciting for a bored child than to discover a portal that opens into a magical world of fairies and fauns, where a majestic lion battles a bad witch? That's the premise of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Walt Disney Picture's version of the first book in Lewis' seven-volume, allusion-rich, and allegorical exploration of Christian theology.

During the London Blitz, four English children (The Pevensie children, ages 12 to 17) are evacuated to the country, into the care of an eccentric old professor. Soon, the children stumble upon a wardrobe in an unused room. Like Alice in Wonderland, the wardrobe is the portal to another world. Once they cross the threshold, they go into a magical world.

As the Pevensie kids enter Narnia, they have to face some unexpected truths. Jadis the bad-tempered, cold-hearted evil White Queen (Tilda Swinton), holds all of Narnia in her frozen grip.

Their sudden, but expected arrival triggers a call to war. And the lion king messiah Aslan returns to lead the way. Edmund Pevensie (Skandar Keenness), older brother Peter (William Moseley), sister Susan (Anna Popplewell), and, the youngest, Lucy (Georgie Henley), will have to face great challenges as they fight alongside Aslan to return Narnia to the glorious kingdom it used to be.

As fantasy films go, Narnia tells a relatively easy-to-follow story, clearly designed for a younger audience than The Lord of the Rings. The typical core family values theme of the Disney movies mixes its brand of Christian family values with popular English sentiment.

Despite comparisons to The Lord of the Rings, Narnia has more in common with both The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, since all three stories involve children who escape day-to-day pessimism to experience wild adventures.

High-tech special effects enable the filmmakers to breath life into exotic and beautiful creatures of myth and fantasy. Fauns with the legs of goats, half-human and half-horse centaurs, and a magnificent lion that talks and leads an army of gnomes, fairies, beavers, hawks, and foxes are some of the visual marvels this movie offers us.

Director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) makes an impressive live-action debut, getting engrossing performances from his young cast and grafting a nice world of special effects, giving The Chronicles of Narnia an impressive start as another family classic of myth and fable on the big screen.

This wonderful movie gives us back the "special effects film" proper. Here's hoping it helps to wean younger viewers (and older ones who should know better) away from the "might-as-well-be-a-carto​on" overkill of the Matrix and other CGI-fests - even Jackson's Kong has, for me, one dinosaur-chase too many - and back to the mythopoeic splendours of true cinema artists like Ray Harryhausen. Setting aside the technical verisimilitude of 2001 and the zooming rockets of Star Wars, it's no coincidence that the previous benchmark for really special special effects was "Jason and the Argonauts"; bringing mythology to life - that is, putting real performers in the frame with mythical beasts - is the modern age's equivalent of Ovid and the rest doing it in narrative poetry. With Narnia, we finally get a worthy contemporary inheritor of those legacies, cinematic and literary.

Of course, one of the secrets of a great "special effects film" is that the wizardry is complemented by excellence in other areas. Narnia gives us, for a start, some genuinely good child actors (English ones, to boot!) for our protagonists. The young performers here manage to convey emotion and just the right level of anachronism to chime with the story's wartime setting, without resort to jarring Harry Potterish bum notes of trendiness (or that series' often wooden, school-play delivery of the juvenile dialogue). Georgie Henley in particular is absolutely pitch-perfect in her depiction of little Lucy's delight, terror, sadness, and, above all, innocent wonder - the perfect "Disney kid," in fact (and much, much better than that brand might imply).

The Narnia grown-ups are also fantastic, similar streaks ahead of the Potter adult rota: compare James Cosmo's brief and brilliant Father Christmas here with the Dumbledores of Harris and Gambon, for example. Better still, put Tilda Swinton's subtly terrifying White Witch against any of cinema's fear-queens and she's going to come out at the top. James McAvoy's faun is a touching demonstration of that actor's striking versatility.

Meanwhile, on the voice-over front, we have Ray Winstone's delightful Mister Beaver (paired with a Dawn French thankfully restrained from making this character "her own" (i.e. not funny)), a great, appropriate fox from Rupert Everett and many other fine vocalisations, culminating in a gloriously leonine sound-portrait of Aslan from Liam Neeson.

The story is already established as a modern classic; the screenplay is pretty faithful. Pacing, cinematography (a glorious colour palette is on view throughout) and music are all fine, too. But the breath is most taken, of course, by the beautifully-integrated effects. When I spoke of the voice-over performances just now, you have to see what amazing justice is done to the real actors by their animated counterparts (and vice-versa). Facial expressions, body-language, authentic animal behaviour and anthropomorphic adaptations are welded in magnificent style, convincing and entertaining at the same time. The wolves look as real as the centaurs; the demons are as alive as the cheetahs; the gryphon (the gryphon!) is somehow truer to "life" than, say, any of the Black Beauties we've seen filmed. The phoenix is astounding. In true Jason style, we also get a harpy, taunting Aslan on his way to his execution.

The masterpiece in this gallery of wonders, indeed, has to be Aslan; the lion is real; super-real; moving just for being so beautifully realised !!

This is a tale by C.S. Lewis, a timeless adventure. Four siblings discover the magical kingdom through a game of hide and seek first discovered by Lucy, and then by the others. Edmund, Susan, Lucy, and Peter have been sent to this English country side manor by their mother for protection from the bombers pounding London during World II. Edmund falls for the white witches' (Jadis) story of becoming king and not Peter the older brother. Jadis is out to keep any humans from fulfilling the prophecy which would end her reign. Edmund sells out several characters to obtain this, only to fall from grace. The special effects are amazing they bring the fairy tale creatures to life. Dwarves, fauns, centaurs, giants, and Aslan a wise lion as Peters' mentor. You have chases across melting lakes that have been frozen since Jadis started her reign of perpetual winter. Be prepared for the climatic and age old battle of good over evil. The Chronicles of Narnia is truly an excellent addition to any DVD library. I bought it to add to my library so I can watch it when I want to without being cut up for commercials as eventually most movies do. What I liked about it was that the movie did not drag on. It kept you interested and excited.

Too often when a well-loved book is made into a movie, the screenwriters take such liberties with the characters and plot that the story is changed almost beyond recognition. Not so with this movie version of the beloved book by C.S. Lewis. The actors were well-chosen; the script was excellent; and the special effects were quite believable. As the story goes, the White Witch has taken possession of Narnia with her black magic. Ruthless and cruel, she reigns as a tyrant throughout the land, where, because of her dark powers, "It's always winter, but never Christmas." Asland, the Lion, returns just as the prophecy about the "Four Sons of Adam and Four Daughters of Eve" have slipped into Narnia through a magical wardrobe. The school-age children can't conceive of themselves as monarchs -- much less heroes -- in the beautiful, magical land, but as the story unfolds, their characters grow and mature.
Thankfully, the screenwriters remained true to the original story which was, of course, an allegory. The special effects were sometimes breathtaking, with mythical creatures like fawns, centaurs, dwarfs, and elves, as well as talking beavers and animals of all sorts. There were no unnecessary elements: foul language or unnecessary violence -- although there are battle scenes which might be just a little bit scary for younger children -- nor any type of inappropriate innuendo. Just a clean, wholesome story of Good versus Evil.
This movie (and its sequel, Prince Caspian) became an instant success with our whole family. In fact, we promised ourselves to buy the DVD, even as we were walking out of the theater.

A great way to entertain yourself. Just pop "The Lion, the Witch & The Wardrobe" into your DVD player and you're set if rain forces you to stay inside. The movie is very good with image effects, but does deviate from the book at several times. For one thing, while the book says that the kids were evacuees from London during World War II, the Blitz was added on especially for the movie. The book was probably set in late-1939, which saw the biggest-ever of all the evacuations of women and children from London and other big cities in Britain. By the time the blitz was underway, evacuation was down to a trickle as most Britons were determined to tough it out together. Another area where the movie deviated from the book was that the kids hid in the closet, not because they broke a window playing ball, but to hide from the lady of the house as she was showing guests around. In this version of Narnia, Peter and Susan are portrayed as a little more immature than in the book, often given to making sarcastic comments to each other, which is typical of teenagers. They look more like 21st Century teenagers appearing in a movie that just happened to be set in 1939 or 1940.
This edition of Narnia is far more dramatic and emotionally charged than a BBC version which was released at the end of the 1980s. This version feels like a movie, not just a videotaped stage play and brings all the movie and film technology of the 21st Century to an old story.