HIGH SPIRITS: Narnia Triumphant

...But the techniques of animation and the attitudes of (one or two) movie makers have moved on...

...That's a good result for Narnia and the values it represents...

...So the good children fight for their bad brother and in the end Edmund turns away from the White Witch...

...But there is still a penalty to be paid for his original treason...

...He worried that Hollywood would never faithfully portray the book's moral themes of forgiveness, redemption, and the struggle between good and evil...

...Down with Aslan...

...So let's give a hand for Philip Anschutz, the owner of Walden Media and the maker of Narn...

...Narnia represents everything that is most hateful about religion...

...My friends think I'm a candidate for a lobotomy," he says, "and my competitors think I'm naive or stupid or both...

...An unassuming character on the surface, he clearly derives inner strength from his devout Presbyterianism and the happiness of his own family life...

...This is not just another beautifully crafted production with spectacular ingredients doing good business at the box office...

...Gopnik seems to be getting into bullying himself when he accuses Lewis of being "nasty," "a prig," "a racist," "a warped, morbid, stammering sexual pervert," and "a very odd kind of Christian...

...These were understandable anxieties from an author who last went to the cinema in 1962...

...It captures the imagination of children not because of Christian religiosity (which a child can easily miss completely, so gentle is the movie's theological message) but because of Christian values, particularly family values...

...He was particularly concerned that the hero of Narnia, the lion Asian, would be Disneyfied into a cartoon animal, utterly incapable of capturing the transcendence of a Christ-like King evoking awe, tenderness, mercy, and the majestic power of sacrifice followed by glorious resurrection...

...If you turn this personalized abuse on its head, substitute the word "Gopnicity," for "religiosity," and apply the criticism back to the New Yorker's article you get a fair idea of what is going on here...

...It needed a lion of a producer to invest $75 million of his own money into the making of The Chronicles of Narnia, someone with a loud enough roar of personal decisiveness and a thick enough skin of moral certainty to defy the conventional skepticism of film industry and media liberalism...

...But I don't care...

...screamed the headlines of the paper's G2 style section cover story...

...For "conservative Gopnicity" read "oldfashioned knee-j erk liberalism" of the kind that is driven crazy by the very notion of children's stories with a Christian allegory...

...Out of greed and weakness he becomes a slave to the White Witch and her endless supplies of Turkish Delight...

...mutual support in the family despite the knowledge of each other's weaknesses...

...Lewis, Philip Anschutz, and the Walden team have won a great victory...

...This brings us to the real battle of Narnia...

...The resulting combination of brilliant 21st-century technology by Disney and visionary film-making by Narnia's producers, Walden Media, has laid Lewis's fears to rest...

...His earlier books include Nixon: A Life...

...You can imagine how hard her buttons get pressed by a box office success from Christian American film-makers: "Narnia is the perfect Republican muscular Christianity for America-that warped distorted neo-fascist strain that thinks might is proof of right," wrote Toynbee, attacking the character of Aslan for his "pure awesome power" and concluding with the rant, "We don't need God...

...If it were only that, there would have been no vituperative attacks from the Guardian, the New Yorker, and other camp followers...

...If we can make some movies that have a positive effect on people's lives and on our culture, that's enough for me...

...Lewis for his "bullying brand of religiosity," his "conservative religiosity," and his "narrow-hearted religiosity...

...It is fair to assume even from these modest words that influencing the direction of our culture is the real purpose of Mr.Anschutz's movie-making...

...He is usually described as "a reclusive Colorado billionaire," but I found him approachable and easy to talk to at a couple of pleasant social encounters in London late last fall...

...Two days before the world premiere of Narnia in London last December the Guardian fired its opening salvo...

...By any normal standards of measurement such as box office receipts, audience reactions, superlative acting, and inspired directing, The Chronicles of Narnia is a triumph...

...In this context the most significant character in the movie is the bad boy of the family, Edmund...

...For what is so narrow-hearted about the liberal secularist attack on Narnia is its failure to recognize that this is above all a warm-hearted children's story...

...This is where, at a late stage in the story, the Christian allegory comes in as Aslan the lion lays down his own life to spare Edmund...

...As for"narrow-heartedness," this is a charge that can't begin to be made to stick on C.S...

...Jonathan Aitken, The American Spectator's High Spirits columnist, is author of the new book, Charles W. Colson: A Life Redeemed (Doubleday...

...The author of the accompanying article was Polly Toynbee, the high priestess of atheism and antiAmericanism in Britain's liberal media elite...

...The cheering for the movie's success has however been accompanied by some noisy and nastyj eering at its success...

...LEWIS MUST BE CHUCKLING in the celestial clouds a s he looks down on the newbattle for Narnia that has i been raging among earthlings over the new movie of I ! his children's classic, The Lion, the Witch and the ~lk i ]Wardrobe...

...It is also the real purpose of the battle for Narnia...

...So enslaved is Edmund that he even betrays his own brothers and sister...

...A second line of attack on all that Narnia represents came from the New Yorker, where Adam Gopnik had a tediously repetitive go at C.S...

...We need no holy guide books, only a very human moral compass.., we can do well without an Aslan...

...I was wrong" might be one of his first ~contented comments, because in his lifetime Lewis was fearful of his masterpiece being made into a movie...

...He is our brother after all," says Peter, "even if he is rather a little beast...

...Already a positive cultural impact has been made on millions ofmoviegoers while a wailing chorus of white witches from the liberal secularist protest movement has been left looking sidelined and silly...

...MOVIE ABOUT FAMILY LOYALTY through thick / _ ~ and thin...

...These sneerers and jeerers are hostile secularists from the liberal commentariat who have launched an onslaught of outrage against the movie and its message...

...They have been fighting with extraordinary venom, springing their initial attacks from two great castles of liberal journalism-the Guardian in Britain and the New Yorker in the U.S...

...human weakness by one family ~ member...

...forgiveness within the family, family courage, and ultimately divine redemption for the family delivers a warm, indeed, a revolutionary, message...

...It is certainly outside the box of contemporary film-making by Hollywood studios and syndicates...

...Lewis as the baddies in his epic...

...Yet in a strange way these attacks are a kind of homage...

...It is being waged by cold, authoritarian misery makers who bear more than a passing resemblance to the White Witch and her killjoy cohorts created by C.S...

...But it's only one battle in the long saga of cultural wars that lie ahead...

...FEBRUARY 2006 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR 47...

...Yet at the moral and dramatic heart of the story is the way Edmund's siblings stay loyal to him, even though they know he has been a traitor...

...For they signal that C.S...

...46 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR FEBRUARY 2006 JONATHAN AITKEN Lewis but which sticks all too easily on Gopnik, Toynbee, and their imitators...