20 Years Later, The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe Holds Up Surprisingly Well
Turkish or not, it’s a delight.
In the mid-2000s, family films seemingly had one goal: find the next Harry Potter. Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings movies proved there was an audience for large-scale fantasy novel adaptations, and the Harry Potter movies proved that magical stories about British children were the hip new thing.
Twenty years ago, one movie got closer than any other to capturing the hearts of children everywhere, and 20 years later, it’s still a diamond in the rough that’s about to get a makeover.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was a massive gamble by Disney, but it had all the ingredients of the next big thing in pop culture. Like The Lord of the Rings, it had an ambitious New Zealand director in Andrew Adamson, who had just directed Dreamworks’ Shrek and Shrek 2. It also had a script based on C.S. Lewis’ fantasy novel, co-written by Christopher Markus and Stephen McFeely, who would go on to write Avengers: Endgame. But the most obvious strength of the movie is more ineffable than names on a call sheet: it looks magical.
From the minute you meet the Pevensie children, evacuated to a mysterious professor’s mansion during WWII, they feel like your best friends, especially Lucy (Georgie Henley.) When she discovers the land of Narnia inside a wardrobe during a game of hide-and-seek (a change from the original book), it transforms the movie as drastically as the reveal of Oz in The Wizard of Oz. Adamson filmed most of the scenes in chronological order, so when Lucy walks into Narnia and meets the scarf-wearing faun Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy), it’s actually Henley’s genuine reaction to seeing the amazing world and creature effects by Wētā Workshop.
But as the other children enter Narnia and explore it, they discover the land is a snowy hellscape ruled over by Jadis the White Witch (a terrifying Tilda Swinton). The Pevensies side with lion (and Christ symbol) Aslan (Liam Neeson) in a massive battle culminating in the children becoming rulers of the land for years to come.
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe brought the fairy-tale whimsy of the original book to life.
C.S. Lewis’ original book has been a classic for over half a century now, and this movie proved that love could translate to the silver screen, as The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe was soon followed by two additional sequels: Prince Caspian in 2008 and Voyage of the Dawn Treader in 2010, celebrating its 15th anniversary this week.
While the Disney movies may have petered out, in part due to the tragic passing of producer Perry Moore, the Chronicles of Narnia books are set to be adapted yet again by Netflix, with Barbie filmmaker Greta Gerwig signed on to write and direct at least the first two. However, unlike the Disney movies, this adaptation is tackling the books in chronological order instead of publication order. Therefore, the first movie won’t cover the events of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, but instead will adapt The Magician’s Nephew, the prequel book that followed the childhood of the wardrobe’s strange owner — and the origin story of Narnia itself.
If the Netflix movies follow this pattern, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe will be the next book adapted. But until that film is released, this 2000s artifact will stand as the perfect adaptation of one of the greatest fantasy books of all time.
