InsaneJournal

I have got to do some fiction writing or something. But it's like I'm drowning in meta essays-some day those files will finally get cleaned out. Maybe like half of the stuff I'd like to say isn't even worth saying.



In the Disney LWW, there’s a scene where the Pevensies have just entered Narnia all together, they’re all joking and laughing by the entrance to the wardrobe when Susan glances at Edmund briefly. Edmund is not taking part in the fun at all.

Susan glances at Edmund with this knowing, suspicious expression. And he looks back at her like he knows she might know that his motives for being in Narnia were less than pure. It’s very chilling and well done. The fact that they are generally on the same wavelength for such a long time is important to the future evolution of their characters in both book and movieverse. Her faith is dying while his is growing and in the end, she even though they'll both fall, he'll even fall first, he'll pick himself back up but she won't, even though everyone thought it would be the other way round.

Like a lot of other fans, I wasn't too happy with Disney's choice to add in a Susan/Caspian romance (I think the typo of "Suspain" mentioned on fanficrants is sadly, so apt). But it's unsurprising and makes a certain amount of internal sense. They wanted a nice het romance and Lucy was too young. Plus, by convoluted means it served to halfway out William Mosely, so...

Disney and the BBC both have the same problem with character ages though. The BBC filmed theirs too fast, so the kids did age but not as much as they should have. The Disney people are taking too long, by the time they get to "Horse and His Boy" Will, Anna, Skandar, and Georgie will be old enough to play themselves as grownups.

As previously mentioned, the Disney films add in a lot of information about the main characters and their world that Lewis never bothered to mention. Their mother has been given a first name, “Helen” (this gives us two characters named Helen, which could become a problem) , and even though their father is never named, we’re at least shown a blurry photograph of a dark haired man in a military uniform. They’ve also been given a home town, “Finchley” , an actual area of greater London, and their boarding schools have been named (and there are uniforms for those worn in the film, so helpful for fanfiction and cosplay). Susan and Lucy go to “St. Finbar’s”. I didn’t catch the name of the boy’s school.

In the BBC version of Prince Caspian, they wait at a country train station. In the Disney one, they’re waiting at an urban station. Once again, the Disney version gives us more background characterization, actually dealing a little bit with how being thrown back into life as children affects them. They’ve very carefully considered each Pevensie and kept their characterizations faithful to the books but made them *more* themselves. The books consider their future selves but the Disney movies take those traits and run with them.

They’re movies made by people who are genuine fans of the series, as geeky as we are about it. They have all these little details- when Lucy opens the wardrobe door for the first time, a few mothballs fall out, just like they’re described as doing in the book. And in Prince Caspian, although Edmund’s hat isn’t used to carry fish, someone on the production remembered he was supposed to be wearing a hat.

The BBC ones are perhaps *too* faithful to the books, not bothering to give us much in the way of extra character development. For the Pevensies anyway, I'll get to Eustace in a minute.

I can’t compare any of the other movies because the BBC made four but Disney has only made two so far. But I can still talk about how the last two BBC movies compare to the books. Their “Dawn Treader” is incredibly faithful to the book and is usually considered much better than the previous two tv movies. Their boring Peter and their useless Susan are gone, and Caspian has been recast with someone who can act reasonably well. There are no battles, which they weren’t any good at staging anyway. I don’t know how Disney and Walden Media will handle the lack of battles, they seem to like them so much and battles are good for drawing in an audience. Yeah, if I had to pick another flaw of the Disney versions it's that they seem to feel that they need to keep people's attention with extra action.

I’m entertained by the part in the BBC VotD where Caspian lends them his extra clothes and apologizes to Lucy because “we don’t have any clothes for ladies on board”. So she ends up wearing purple leggings, little pointy boots, and a puffyshirt with flowers embroidered across the chest. Apparently, Caspian’s taste in clothing carried over to the Disney Prince Caspian too.

The BBC Silver Chair is an odd little movie. You’d expect it to be shaky, because this is the first time there will be absolutely no Pevensies in the picture, but it’s probably the best installment of all. For one thing, the BBC Pevensies don’t make as strong of an impression as the Disney ones, so the fact that they are no longer around doesn’t exactly fill the viewer with dread. I don't know whether they got a new scriptwriter or a new director or what. The acting and writing aren't perfect but they make some very wise choices in both areas and I believe they were nominated for some awards. Maybe it was the presence of Tom Baker-child actors often do better when working intensely in a small cast with a talented grownup actor (this might explain Dawn Treader too) than they do when working with a large cast of other inexperienced children.

But they seem to "get" Eustace and Jill the way the Disney movies "get" the Pevensies.

They’ve made the characters’ progressive beliefs a plus instead of the minus Lewis might have meant for it to be sometimes. It’s always tricky, dealing with that, because the things that made them “weird” to the author and the first generation to read the original story were just normal life to the first generation to watch this film. Especially if it’s an American audience (many American readers, especially of my generation and younger, don’t react to the Experiment House as if it’s amusing satire, but either shrug it off as perfectly normal or shudder because they recognize it as their own middle school).

This Silver Chair actually remembers that Jill and Eustace are supposed to be vegetarians. Oh, they still eat meat, but they remark on how they don’t usually do this, and Jill says, after Eustace expresses horror at having eaten a Talking Animal, how she thought it was bad enough eating animals that couldn’t talk. They are, if possible, also even more USTtastic than in the books.

They changed a certain line from the book and made it, imo, interesting. When Puddleglum is slow and cranky the next morning after his binge at the giant’s castle, in the book Eustace says “Puddleglum has a headache”. In the movie, he blurts out, “Puddleglum has a hangover.” Puddleglum glares at him and Eustace amends quickly, “I mean, a headache!”

I’m not sure which is better. Eustace doesn’t drink, so he might not recognize the signs of being hung over. However, he is also well known for blurting out tactless truths at bad times. He’s the Cordelia Chase of Narnia. Not just in that sense either.

Their Prince Rillian is even more annoying than in the book, and during the part where they’re stuck in that room and have to listen to him talk, I’m always thinking “so this is what Hell is like in Narnia”.

The actress who plays the Lady is the same one who played Jadis. I never noticed until I saw it on IMDB.

None of the maps for any version of Narnia make sense, and the book timelines do not match up with the Disney timeline. Which is a problem because the book timeline is confusing enough by itself.

I wonder what they'll do about the confusion over Uncle Horace's name? In the British editions it's "Horace" and in the American editions it's "Harold". I'd never even noticed that before. I don't even understand why it was done. I mean, if the reader can deal with everything else, surely they can handle a guy being named "Horace". After all, Horace isn't exactly some weird name only British people have.

I’ve always liked the music and the opening credits of the BBC version. I won’t compare the CGI and other special effects. It’s not fair. Filmmaking has come a long way since 1987 and it helps that Disney and Walden Media have a Hollywood blockbuster movie budget and not a BBC television budget.