Posted by: @hermit

Talking of animation, I know this will probably cause outrage but I preferred the 1979 animated version of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe to the live action Walden version. Yes I know the animation is a bit crude, but it's so much more faithful to the book and Aslan's resurrection scene is just so joyous that I can't help prefer it.

I don't think that's outrageous at all — I for one totally agree with you!! The Walden version of LWW is very well done as a film in itself, but I've always felt it somehow totally loses the spirit of the original story, even though it doesn't stray as far from the plot as the two later films did. I've only seen it the once, at the cinema when it first came out, and by the time it was over I felt so severely let down that I've never had the slightest desire to watch it again.

The 1979 animated film is the one I remember from when I was really really little — we watched it on TV some time in the mid-1980s, and then a little later Mum read me the original book, which I loved even more. I didn't see the animated film again until just a few years ago, and as you say, although the animation is a little crude — though nowhere near as hokey as the utterly legendary BBC version (bottle-shaped beavers and really bad flying effects, anyone?? ) — it's just so sweet and heartfelt and, as you say, very faithful to the book. The only major change I can remember is that Father Christmas is left out (an understandable artistic choice which doesn't make any real difference to the plot) and Aslan gives Peter and Susan and Lucy their gifts instead. And yes, the scene where Aslan comes back to life is so much fun, as he leaps around and flowers spring up everywhere! I don't think any other screen version has come close to the joyous romp that Lewis describes in the book (one of my favourite scenes of all). I also love the part where he brings the statues back to life, with lots of sparkly magic!! Must watch it again some time soon...  

(Edit: I should add I have a very soft spot for the BBC versions of Narnia as well, since they came out when I was 7 years old or so and I watched them when they were first on TV. They were just as laughable then with the "special" (?) effects as they are now, but they were also very faithful to the books. My main problem with them is that they rushed through Prince Caspian (the longest book in the series!) in only two episodes, far too fast to do it any kind of justice! But the other three adaptations are, while not perfect, still pretty good for what they are.)

@courtenay 

I've seen all of the adaptions of LWW and the BBC and Walden adaptions of Narnia. I can't say I'd hate them, especially Walden's Voyage of the Dawn Treader. It was a more of a hit or miss, in comparison to the first two Walden movies. The last straw for Walden's Voyage of the Dawn Treader was the Green Mist. Narnia is known to have great villains, especially to the White Witch, Miraz, and Rishda. The Green Mist was not even a good villain!

I think we can all agree on that no company is perfect.

That's probably true of any fantasy adapted into movies. I prefer the Peter Jackson version of Lord of the Rings over the animated adaption, but it's still not perfect. Even the movies that I love can still have major flaws in it.

To get back to comparing other fantasy to Narnia, I wonder what you all think of Alan Garner. I loved his first book, The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and its sequel The Moon of Gomrath. These seemed very much a homage to the fantasy style of both Lewis and Tolkein. But the more Garner developed his own distinctive style the less I actually liked him. I enjoyed Elidor, but The Owl Service rather less and Red Shift and later books not at all. Years later he published a continuation of Brisingamen and Gomrath to make a trilogy, with a novel called Boneland. I haven't read it but I understand that like LeGuin with Earthsea he deconstructed the earlier books, leaving readers wondering if the events of them actually happened at all. Perhaps he felt a certain resentment that his first book was still the most popular and well known but wasn't really representative of his writing.

@hermit I read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen  when I was still in primary school but don't remember a thing about it other than the title, which suggests it didn't leave a great impression on me!! (And there are plenty of other books I read around that time that I still remember vividly — it's unusual for me to forget nearly everything about a book I've read unless I really didn't enjoy it.) I've no idea why, as I was already a huge fan of Lewis and Tolkien at that age and The Weirdstone did sound very much in that vein, which would have been what attracted me to it in the first place. But because nothing about it stuck with me, I never went on to read The Moon of Gomrath or any of his other books!

Funnily enough, I now live in "Alan Garner country" — only a few miles from Alderley Edge, south of Manchester, which is where he lived and is apparently the area that inspired most of his books, certainly those first two. I probably should give them another go and see if I become a fan this time! But I also heard recently about the later sequel that "deconstructs" the earlier books and casts their events into doubt, and that just makes me sad; I feel the same way about what Ursula Le Guin did with Earthsea (I enjoyed the first three books, then read the fourth and was totally put off). I mean, if an author's writing style and pet themes and concerns change over the years, that's fair enough and quite natural. But when authors feel the need to look back and retrospectively change or throw doubt on their earlier works — which many readers will have enjoyed just as they were — it just makes me think, "Can't you leave it alone??"  

That said, there are discrepancies even between the earlier and later books in the Chronicles of Narnia, especially between LWW and MN — not only inconsistencies in the plot (especially to do with the origins and role of Jadis / the White Witch), but also noticeable differences in writing style. Lewis apparently told the editor of Puffin Books (who produced the first paperback editions) that he'd like to go over all the books and fix up some of the parts he was aware of where things didn't quite line up, but that conversation was something like two days before his death, so naturally he never got round to it!! I often wonder what changes he would have made, and whether they'd have improved the books or messed them up (hopefully not!), but that's one of those things we'll never know...

Has anyone read P. L. Travers' Mary Poppins series, or Hugh Loftings' Doctor Dolittle series? I'm showing my age, but I loved both of these as a kid, and they were published around the same time the Chronicles first were. But unlike them, I don't think they stayed in print. May Poppins had a lot of similarities to Narnia -- the kids, the moral lessons, the talking animals and magic, except the kids didn't go to a place -- the magic was embodied in a person. Many of the episodes in those books remain very vivid to me today.

I also love Mary Poppins the Disney movie (the 1960s one) but for different reasons. It's not representative of the book, more like a vey commercial adaptation of it. The music has held up well, and though some bits are corny through today's eyes, others still have real beauty and otherworldliness to them.

@courtenay For Garner I would certainly recommend The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Moon of Gomrath and Elidor. The later books rather less so but that's just my personal taste.

I agree with you that once a series has been finished and several years have passed without any additions to it, it's better to just leave it alone as the author's style and personal philosophy will have probably changed and any addition is likely to disappoint many fans. Besides LeGuin and Garner, another example is Isaac Asimov with his Foundation series. After being a trilogy for nearly two decades he later wrote additional books that were not universally popular among his fans. Ironically, LeGuin, Garner and Asimov were all , at least to some extent, responding to pressure from the fans who wanted more. Sometimes it's better not to get what you wish for!

I really don't think Lewis could have possibly ruined Narnia if he had lived to edit the books, simply because his worldview did not change in any significant way between writing LWW and his death. At most he'd have tidied up some of the inconsistencies. Perhaps one issue he'd have addressed is that of women fighting. In LWW the prohibition from Father Christmas seems absolute, yet in later books we see both Lucy and Jill participate in battles. If he had lived to edit the first book, perhaps Lewis would have softened Father Christmas's words a bit.

@cobalt-jade my sister and I read all the Mary Poppins books, probably before the film came out (showing ny age), and loved them all. I've got a couple of second hand ones on my bookshelf still. 

Travers had a very pagan worldview rather than Christian. As well as taking the children to fascinating shops and houses where Mary P's odd friends and relatives lived or worked, she also introduced them to figures from the zodiac and heavens with Classical names.

We also read some of the Doctor Dolittle books, but I found them a bit odd fashioned. I think it's because it was less fantasy and more fun and adventure. 

Some of the other children's books I liked were also not fantasy. We got English weekly children's magazines with picture stories often featuring animals living human lives ('dressed animals' Lewis called them). In this category are The Wind In The Willows, Winnie the Pooh, and the Moomin series. The stories Jack & Warnie Lewis wrote as boys are the same type, telling human stories in animal characters. 

@cobalt-jade I read two of the Doctor Dolittle books when I was a kid. I don't think I did so more than once though. 

I've read (continue to reread) the Mary Poppins books several times though. Here's a description I did of them on a blog post. 

The world of Mary Poppins was always new and exciting and also always familiar and comforting. That was everything I wanted out of life as a kid. Come to think of it, it’s pretty much what I want out of life now.

I've watched a movie called Saving Mr. Banks, and P.L Travers originally didn't Mary Poppins to be adapted into a movie. Walt Disney tried to talk her into it, but she wouldn't have anything to do with it.

Posted by: @courtenay

@hermit I read The Weirdstone of Brisingamen  when I was still in primary school but don't remember a thing about it other than the title, which suggests it didn't leave a great impression on me!!

Same here.  I don't remember the plotline at all.

Oh dear. I'm reading the Earthsea books for the first time right now, and this thread is making me a little apprehensive about finishing it. Though, it's also kind of a relief - I've been kind of trying to force myself to finish Book 3, which simply hasn't grabbed my interest the way the first two did. Maybe I won't bother.

But, onto the topic. I haven't read a lot of the books discussed in this thread (other than Harry Potter, Earthsea, and of course Narnia), but I have been reading quite a bit of Brandon Sanderson lately, as well as a few other authors. I have noticed that, unless I've just been picking all the right (or wrong) authors, the modern trend seems to be towards very "hard" fantasy - magic systems must be explained in exacting detail, readers have clear timelines of when historical events happened, etc.

I certainly don't have a problem with that (Avatar: The Last Airbender is my favorite TV show, and I'd argue that the bending in that show is a "hard" magic system with clearly defined rules). But I think one of Narnia's strengths is its "soft" fantasy - the magic isn't clearly explained or defined (one might say it's even wild), and there is so much we don't know about the world of Narnia (or the worlds beyond!) despite all the time we spent there.

For example, when I was younger, I was a bit frustrated that the books never really explained what it meant for Narnia's stars to be actual, living beings (partially because of all the fantasy elements introduced, I think this one intrigued me the most). Now that I'm older, I'm almost glad that Lewis never gave us all the answers. He gave us just enough to invite my imagination to take over.

There is a fantasy called Stardust, which much like Narnia, stars are depicted are humanoid beings, in this case a young woman (I could have sworn that Ramandu's daughter in Walden's adaption of Voyage of the Dawn Treader had resemblance to the girl in Stardust).

I actually believe Narnia is more realistic than Kenneth Graham’s The Wind in the Willows. The talking animals act more like real animals and most of them are not dressed in human clothing.  I remember reading that Lewis admired The Wind in the Willows, although he may have been more successful in creating talking animals that are more believable.  The Wind in the Willows is a fine book, which is very appealing to children. However, I think that for me Narnia is more like a real place that I wish I could visit. 

@narnian78 Definitely agree on The Wind in the Willows — it's beautifully written, but I've never yet been able to get through the entire book, either as a child or as an adult, and one thing I keep stumbling over is the fact that Grahame didn't quite seem to know what size his animal characters are in relation to humans. Mole and Ratty live in the woods in their underground homes, which implies they can't be that much bigger than a real-life mole and water rat (actually water vole), yet when they go off in a caravan, it's drawn by a horse, which has got to be MASSIVELY bigger than either of them, unless it's a Shetland pony (which would still be a bit too big for them) and/or the two of them are many times larger than the real creatures they're based on. And then Toad becomes obsessed with motor-cars, which he buys from humans — but how does a toad drive a car made by and for humans?? — and later disguises himself as a washer-woman in order to escape from a human prison, so he must be big enough to be mistaken for a human... and yet in another scene, a human grabs him by the leg and throws him?!?! Even as a kid I couldn't muster enough suspension-of-disbelief for this, and as an adult it does my head in.  

Lewis gets around problems of scale like this by making his Narnian Talking Beasts bigger than their "dumb animal" counterparts — we're explicitly told that Reepicheep is over a foot high, and in The Magician's Nephew it's noted that when Aslan chooses two of each kind of animal to become the first Talking Beasts, the smaller ones grow "a good deal larger". That works pretty well in a magical world like Narnia, but it's a bit more problematic if you try to have talking / anthropomorphised animals in our world AND have them interact with humans — that's where The Wind in the Willows falls down, I reckon.

I actually remember seeing a Disney cartoon of The Wind and the Willows that came out in the 1940's. I haven't read the book, but I'm sure it's different, as movies are often made different than the books. Yet of course, I don't think you can actually translate a book word for word on screen.