@narnian78 That's your call. I don't want it to be unfriendly. But is there any way someone could disagree with you or object to your reasoning without offending you?

Here's a good reason not to update The Silver Chair. Most school bullying these days is cyber bullying (Well, that's what makes the headlines anyway. There's likely some physical bullying that doesn't get as much press.) To feel relevant, the bullying at Experiment House would have to consist of that and in that case, Caspian, Jill and Eustace thrashing the bullies might not feel proportionate since those bullies hadn't been using physical force against anyone. The punishment wouldn't fit the crime as well. 

@col-klink 

I will only present my views here, but I don’t say that people have ignored them or have not read them when there is no proof of it.  I just say why I agree or disagree. Then no offense should be taken by anyone.

I think members should reread the rules whenever they are tempted to criticize other people on this forum even if they claim they are not being unfriendly. If they are being condescending it is basically the same as saying “My ideas are better than yours”.  That is not acceptable according to the rules as stated here:

https://community.narniaweb.com/index.php/community/the-spare-oom/spare-oom-bylaws-forum-and-section-rules/

Here is maybe one to put the cat amongst the pigeons then.... we are 5 pages in, and I'm surprised that no-one has mentioned one of the biggest reasons why want a film studio might want to modernise the setting (other than the reasons stated previously) and that is for increasing diversity and representation amongst the cast.

If you set the stories in 1940s London (or 1900-ish for MN) then you are pretty much obliged to cast all of the main children roles as a British White ethnicity. Yes there were probably 'some' non-white children in England at the time, but they would probably have been so rare that casting non-white children in these roles would instantly work against the idea of the child characters all just being regular normal children of the era.

A contemporary setting however gives you the option of casting any child of almost any ethnic background in any of the child roles. You could probably even get away with the sibling characters not needing to match, if you throw in the idea of increased rates of adoption / step-siblings / half-siblings etc.

Again, i'm still going to stick to my vote answer of "I'd prefer 1940s, but ultimately it doesn't really matter", but as with previous posts, there aren't no reasons for modernising... its just a case of whether the reasons for keeping the 1940s setting outweigh them.

Looking at it as objectively as I can, I think what's happening in this discussion is that there are two different implicit arguments being put forward about "Lewis's intentions", with different conclusions:

1. Lewis set the Chronicles of Narnia just slightly before the time in which he was writing (about 10 years back) so that the setting would be near-contemporary and his young readers would be able to relate to these books better, with WW2 being a recent memory and its after-effects still ongoing. Therefore, in order to get the effect Lewis was aiming for, it would be good to set a new adaptation of Narnia in the present day, or close to it.

2. Lewis set the Chronicles of Narnia in the era he did because that particular period was important to him and to the atmosphere of the books. Therefore to set a new adaptation in the present day would definitely be going against Lewis's intentions.

With all respect to those who've put views forward on either side, I don't think either of those positions are fully defensible. We simply don't know enough about Lewis's actual intentions in choosing that setting. I don't think he's on record anywhere as answering the question of why he set them in that era — I don't know if anybody ever asked him that specifically! — and he's not here to tell us what he would actually think of either updating the setting or leaving it as he wrote it. So really, any "Lewis would want this" or "Lewis wouldn't want that" arguments, on either side, are largely our own way of justifying our own opinions on the matter.

In any case, I can see problems with both those positions. We don't have any evidence that Lewis chose a near-contemporary setting specifically so that his readers could relate to it. As far as I'm aware, however, he made several remarks to the effect that in the Narnia books, he was writing the kinds of stories that he would have liked to read as a child — along the lines of "other people won't write the kind of stories I like, so I had to do it myself" — and he also denied the idea that he was looking into child psychology and other current theories in order to figure out what kinds of stories he "ought" to write for children. So I somehow doubt that the almost-present-day setting was important to him primarily for that reason.

On the other hand, as I know I brought up earlier, the idea that the WW2 setting was specifically important to Lewis is rather scotched by the fact that the wartime setting plays zero role in the actual stories — it's just the reason given for the Pevensies staying at the Professor's house and then it never comes up again at all, even implicitly. So over-emphasising that period setting (as the Walden movie does a little, and one stage version I've seen did a lot) is definitely doing something with the story that Lewis himself didn't do, even though he could have.

It might be worth noting that the only other reference to "the war" in the entire series of books only underscores how unimportant it is to the overall story. It comes in VDT — the third book Lewis wrote — when, in the first chapter, we're told that the Professor (who is coaching Peter for exams) no longer lives in the house where "these four children had had wonderful adventures long ago in the war years", because he has "somehow become poor since the old days".

Now this is the point where it becomes obvious that even after only three books (and he later claimed he wasn't originally intending to write more), Lewis has totally lost track of his timeframe and clearly doesn't really care. None of the actual Narnia books give an exact year they're set in — we only know their supposed settings from the timeline that Lewis wrote later, possibly near the end of his life. But from their explicit internal chronology, we know that PC is set one year (in our world!) after LWW, and VDT is set one year after PC. So if LWW is set in 1940 — which is most likely even without the timeline, because most of the evacuations of children happened during 1939-1940 — then VDT is set in 1942. That's still during the war, which makes an absolute mockery of "the war years" being "long ago" and in "the old days"!!! (It also, as I remember arguing somewhere else, makes it pretty unlikely that the children's parents would be off on a working holiday in America, with the US now involved in the war as well and with all the restrictions on travel.)

So from that, I can only conclude that the wartime setting wasn't a great big deal to Lewis, since he didn't even manage to be consistent about it within the first few books (which were written in quick succession). I get the impression he was just writing what he wanted to write, and probably really enjoying doing so, and not paying much attention to whether or not he got the very few relevant historical details right.

Where does that leave us, then? Naturally everyone will come to their own conclusions, but my own stance on updating the setting of the Chronicles is still a no — not because of "Lewis's intentions" either way (since we can't be quite clear on those), but because I can't see that setting these stories in the present day would do anything to improve or enhance them, and any attempts to make the this-world scenes look "modern" will look dated themselves in another 10 years or so. So I really can't find any persuasive arguments for any period setting other than the original.

Posted by: @icarus

If you set the stories in 1940s London (or 1900-ish for MN) then you are pretty much obliged to cast all of the main children roles as a British White ethnicity. Yes there were probably 'some' non-white children in England at the time, but they would probably have been so rare that casting non-white children in these roles would instantly work against the idea of the child characters all just being regular normal children of the era.

A contemporary setting however gives you the option of casting any child of almost any ethnic background in any of the child roles.

There are actually a number of recent movies and shows (I'm sorry the only title I can remember is The Personal History of David Copperfield) that took stories that took place in cultures where most everyone would be white and used diverse casting. The audience was expected to either imagine they were all white or imagine this took place in an alternate universe. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix's Narnia didn't change the time period but did that. 

Now you could argue that that kind of colorblind casting works better on the stage than on the screen. For some viewers, it will be a distraction. Keeping the ethnicities of the actors the same as those of the original characters makes it feel like this is the real Narnia, not some Hollywood imagining. (Then again, there are always going to be a few historical accuracies so maybe we shouldn't even bother chasing that horse.)

But you could also argue that not using "colorful" casting would be a distraction if every other movie and show is doing it. It might take some viewers out of the experience and lead them to wonder if the director has anything against certain people groups. 

Personally, whichever of those options they choose, I'm willing to try to enjoy the movie for what it is. 

Posted by: @icarus

If you set the stories in 1940s London (or 1900-ish for MN) then you are pretty much obliged to cast all of the main children roles as a British White ethnicity. Yes there were probably 'some' non-white children in England at the time, but they would probably have been so rare that casting non-white children in these roles would instantly work against the idea of the child characters all just being regular normal children of the era.

I've thought a bit about this too (though not specifically in the context of this discussion), and to me, most of that problem is offset by the fact that most of the Narnian characters can be as "diverse" as you like, and really should be. We already have it as canon that Tumnus has "rather reddish" skin, which has been ignored in every live-action production (film or stage) I've ever seen. (Whitewashing!!! ) And there's nothing in the books to suggest that any of the other part-human or human-like peoples in Narnia — Dwarfs, Dryads, Naiads, Centaurs, and so on, plus the relatively small human population in Narnia — must all be light-skinned. It would make it far more interesting to have them include the full range of available skin tones, plus possibly some that people in our world don't have. And that would emphasise even further that Narnia is a land where an incredible variety of sentient beings live together in harmony, most of the time, which is far more than we can say about human beings in this world.

(There is definitely some emphasis, particularly in HHB and LB, on Narnian humans being mostly light-skinned and the Calormenes being dark-skinned, which immediately puts us in bad territory by today's standards. If I were directing the new Narnia film franchise, I would simply have it that both populations have a variety of skin tones, but the Calormenes are darker on average than most Narnians — understandable for people living in a hot climate — so that Shasta in HHB can still stand out for his very light-coloured skin and hair. I would probably just leave out the bit in LB where Tirian and Jill and Eustace darken their faces when they disguise themselves in Calormene armour — meaning I'd have them leave their skin as it is — since "blackface" is, understandably, such a no-no in today's world that it would set off an absolute firestorm of criticism.)

As @col-klink says, colourblind casting is becoming more and more common even for period dramas — at the moment on British TV, there's a series based on Enid Blyton's Malory Towers series, set in a girls' boarding school in the 1940s or '50s, and although I haven't seen it myself (I don't watch much TV!), I gather the cast is far more diverse than would be realistic for an English school of that era. I'm also a member of an Enid Blyton discussion forum, and comments about this from members who have watched the show range from "this is terribly anachronistic, they shouldn't do that" to "they absolutely SHOULD do this in order to make up for all the racism that has been inherent in the casting of British TV shows until recently"... and so on. It's one of those things that I doubt everybody will ever agree on.

However, when it comes to the main child characters from our world, I would argue that even in the 1940s setting, the one who could believably be cast as non-white is Jill Pole. She's the only one whose family we know nothing about — we never hear a thing about who her parents are or what they are like — so, unlike the Pevensies and Scrubbs and Kirkes and Plummers, who are all very upper-middle-class and therefore almost certainly white, Jill could possibly be mixed-race. I wouldn't think there's a need to explain her background or parentage (it could perhaps even be implied that she's orphaned, or maybe adopted), but if she stands out as one of very few ethnic minority children at Experiment House, that could implicitly give the bullies all the more reason to pick on her, because she's "different". And then having her take part in two Narnian adventures, and being completely accepted by the other Friends of Narnia and by the Narnian characters as well, should send a good message — that it's not just well-off white kids who get to go to Narnia!

But really, if being able to do the Diversity and Representation thing is the only reason for setting a Narnia adaptation in the present day, I don't think that's a strong enough argument on its own.

Posted by: @courtenay

However, when it comes to the main child characters from our world, I would argue that even in the 1940s setting, the one who could believably be cast as non-white is Jill Pole. She's the only one whose family we know nothing about — we never hear a thing about who her parents are or what they are like — so, unlike the Pevensies and Scrubbs and Kirkes and Plummers, who are all very upper-middle-class and therefore almost certainly white, Jill could possibly be mixed-race. 

I have sometimes wondered if Digory could possibly be cast as mixed race, i.e. his father could be Anglo-Indian. The majority of men working in India during that time period would have been British white but I have read a few different nonfiction (or fiction heavily drawn on personal experience) books set in the British Raj by different authors that had Anglo-Indian characters successfully working in various positions of government or trade. Pauline Baynes' illustrations could certainly support that idea as well.

I am completely supportive of a diverse cast and think @courtenay has some really wonderful casting ideas to show that a diverse society can exist harmoniously but I worry that if all the children are white and most of the Narnians are ethnically diverse it will open up the charge of Lewis supporting colonialism, something I have already seen online. (I could be wrong but I have never come across anything in his other writing that gave me the idea that he did, quite the reverse.)

I wonder that if Lewis were living today if he would actually watch a movie based on his books. He might feel an obligation to watch it if someone he knew were involved in the making of the films (such as Douglas Gresham’s involvement in the Walden films).  But seeing them modernized to the present day might have deterred him from watching them since he was rather medieval in his tastes. And who could blame him for that?  I can understand why he wouldn’t have been happy with seeing his stories changed in that way, although his not wanting any adaptations of his books may have been going a bit too far. He also did not like the idea of making plays or dramas based on them.  I don’t know if a good movie might have changed his mind if it would have promoted his books. Today there are many film adaptations of books, and some are made many years after an author’s lifetime.

I'm in agreement with those who pointed out the importance of timeline accuracy for NM.

Then there are all those potential technology plot wholes. Why don't Susan and Peter call someone to make sure that Lucy gets the help she seemingly needs? Why doesn't Lucy try to prove her story by bring a phone or camera with her into the wardrobe in case it ever leads to Narnia again? Torches work in Narnia, what about more complicated devices? Will Susan have concrete proof of Narnia's existence during The Last Battle?

A competent team of writers could answer all those questions easily, but moving the story this much forward is more trouble than it's worth in my opinion.

@narnian-in-the-north casting Digory as mixed race (Anglo-Indian father) would not be appropriate for that time period. His family was upper middle class, his aunt running a house with servants in London, and then there was the big old house in the country, which I suspect was his grandparents' property. 

@coracle Interracial marriages may not have been common practice amongst the landed gentry and professional class of Victorian Britain but it was by no means unheard of, especially since much of the wealth in the UK had its foundations in colonialism. In addition to the nonfiction I mentioned in my previous post I have read several novels by some of the most preeminent Victorian novelists (Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, et al.) which featured mixed race characters who either resided in a stately home or was a close associate of those who did. Since Digory is a Victorian child I do not feel it would be outside the realm of historical accuracy to cast him as mixed race.

Posted by: @coracle

@narnian-in-the-north casting Digory as mixed race (Anglo-Indian father) would not be appropriate for that time period. His family was upper middle class, his aunt running a house with servants in London, and then there was the big old house in the country, which I suspect was his grandparents' property. 

It's his Great-Uncle Kirke's property, we're told at the end of the book, when the said great-uncle dies and Digory's father inherits his money and the house. Obviously this was Digory's grandfather's brother, presumably the older brother who had inherited the Kirke family home and fortune, but who died childless, so the next in line to inherit the estate was his nephew, i.e. Digory's father. As you say, that's clear evidence that Digory's father's side of the family is not Indian, and it's obvious his mother's side (the Ketterley family) isn't either, so Digory is definitely white British on both sides.

I was wondering if there's a slight possibility that Polly could be mixed race — we don't learn anything much about her family — but I can only conclude it's very unlikely, as the Plummers, like the Ketterleys next door, are wealthy enough to live in a well-off part of London in 1900 and there's nothing in the story that suggests she stands out as "different" — which she definitely would do in that era and social class if she was anything other than white.

So if we do need to do the diversity thing while keeping the stories set in their original era, I'd still say that Jill is the only child from our world who could conceivably work as a mixed-race character. That would still be very rare in a fairly-posh-but-not-ultra-elite boarding school of the 1940s, but not absolutely impossible. If I were directing this, I wouldn't invent a backstory for her (since the books don't give her one, or even any hints of one), and wouldn't have any of the other characters comment directly on her appearance or background; I'd just show her as the one visibly brownish-skinned child in this otherwise all-white school, being victimised by the horrible gang of bullies and running to hide from them, and let the audience just take that in.

Regardless of what her skin colour or background might be, anyway, Jill does seem to be very much an outsider — we never hear of her having any close friends or anyone who really cares about her — and that's a "relatable" thing for many young people, in any era. I know when I was a kid at school (in the 1980s and '90s) and being targeted constantly by bullies, I would have LOVED to find someone who had been to a magical world and who could help me get there too!! 

Posted by: @col-klink

There are actually a number of recent movies and shows (I'm sorry the only title I can remember is The Personal History of David Copperfield) that took stories that took place in cultures where most everyone would be white and used diverse casting. The audience was expected to either imagine they were all white or imagine this took place in an alternate universe. I wouldn't be surprised if Netflix's Narnia didn't change the time period but did that. 

I really enjoyed that David Copperfield adaption (the one with Dev Patel) and similarly also The Green Knight (also starring Dev Patel), both of  which use historically incongruous casting to good effect. But yeah, there are lots of films of this sort where it works perfectly fine.

Now you could argue that that kind of colorblind casting works better on the stage than on the screen. For some viewers, it will be a distraction.

I think the secret to pulling this off lies somewhere in here - the staging and cinematography.

In both of the aforementioned films, the directorial vision has enough of a stylised element to it (such as the whimsical tone of David Copperfield or the dream-like quality of the Green Knight) to basically signify to the audience "hey, don't worry about it".

Similarly with the recent Macbeth film starring Denzel Washington which I really enjoyed. It's notionally set in the correct historical period for Macbeth but it leans into the bare bones styling of a stage play, such that you don't ever really question the casting.

By comparison, the one time recently when such casting did jarr with me was in The Hollow Crown (also shakespeare) which was otherwise filmed in the very traditional manner of a period drama,  and thus the historical ingongruities took me out of the moment much more

Personally, whichever of those options they choose, I'm willing to try to enjoy the movie for what it is. 

Oh absolutely. And whilst I was writing this I thought of the movie that for me most encapsulates this entire debate - the recent Wonka film, which I had a tonne of fun with.

It's sort of set in London or Paris, but not really. It might be set in America (because it's sort of a prequel to the Gene Wilder film) but its not really important either way.

It might be set in the Victorian era, but not specifically any year. It also has elements that are perhaps a more modern than that (cars etc.), but again not really important.

It's all set in a fairly nebulous time and space, because the film understands that those aren't really important details, therefore it just leans into the vibes it needs to tell the story in the way it wants to, and leaves it at that.

As such, I never found myself once questioning any aspect of the casting, or sets or costumes. You just get lost in the magic of seeing a great story told.

Posted by: @icarus

It's all set in a fairly nebulous time and space, because the film understands that those aren't really important details, therefore it just leans into the vibes it needs to tell the story in the way it wants to, and leaves it at that.

As such, I never found myself once questioning any aspect of the casting, or sets or costumes. You just get lost in the magic of seeing a great story told.

And you know, I wouldn't be entirely opposed to a Narnia adaptation being done like this, if it was done well enough. As I know I've said a number of times now, there's no absolute reason why LWW in particular needs to be set during WW2, other than the war being the convenient reason for the four children to be staying in a mysterious old house in the country without their parents.

The Walden version of LWW played up the wartime setting far more than the book does — even if only for a few minutes at the start — and I think that's done a fair bit to pre-condition today's audiences to think that setting is a lot more intrinsic to the story than it actually is, so that we get commentators theorising that Edmund is acting up because he's missing his father who's away in the armed forces, that he chooses Turkish Delight because he's so deprived of sweet treats due to rationing, and so on, when the book never gives any hint of such things. Whereas the now-far-less-well-known 1979 animation proved — even if it wasn't to everyone's taste — that the exact same story works perfectly well without the 1940s setting. We're not told, in that version, why the children are staying at the Professor's house, but apart from that detail and the 1970s-style clothing (which has no effect on the plot), everything else in the basic story is the same. (They left out Father Christmas, but that's a choice that doesn't have anything to do with the time period it's set in.)

The main cringe factor for me in updating the setting would be if they made too much of a point of it — having the kids sporting iPhones (which of course wouldn't pick up reception in Narnia) and moaning about not being able to access social media would just be absurd and jarring and would be a distraction from the main point of the story. I doubt any director would take it to those lengths, but if it's deliberately set in any year from about 2000 onwards, the "what about modern technology?" question does become a factor. Of course, ultra-modern digital-native kids being plucked out of our current era and dropped into a medieval-style fantasy world could make for an interesting story in other ways — and I'm guessing it's already been done by at least a few current fantasy writers — but that's just not what Narnia is about!!  

But if a new adapation didn't make any clear references to a specific era in our world at all — just gave it a vague "mid-late 20th century" vibe for the relatively few scenes that are set on Earth, and put most of the emphasis on the magicalness of Narnia itself — that could work, at least if the entire production was done well enough that viewers don't really stop to think about what era it's set in, but just enjoy the story. I'm still not a great fan of the idea, as I still can't think of any way in which it would really benefit the story, but I'd be willing to watch a version that was done that way and see what I think.

Mod note: @Narnian78, @Courtenay, and @Col-Klink, I've moved your recent posts about marionette puppetry to If Netflix's Narnia is animated, what should it be like? as they were off-topic for this thread. Please continue any discussion there. Thanks!