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Podcast Discussion

Should we be concerned or excited about the success of Game of Thrones and The Lord of the Rings influencing Narnia adaptations?

“Anything that smells or looks like Game of Thrones is something that people are excited about,” said Mark Gordon, co-producer of Netflix’s upcoming Chronicles of Narnia productions.

Listen to our discussion and post a comment!

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Mark Gordon, co-producer of Netflix’s upcoming Chronicles of Narnia adaptations, was quoted in an OZY article about the growing trend of fantasy epics such as Game of Thrones, which premieres its final season this week . The story originally appeared on Financial Times.

Gordon said:

“After Game of Thrones, anything that smells or looks like Game of Thrones is something that people are excited about.”

Gordon also described how he convinced Netflix to develop a Narnia series:

“The pitch was that we would be selling not just one movie or one book as a series. There were 3,000 characters in Narnia. So there was this very ripe opportunity.”

In 2017, Amazon outbid Netflix for the rights to The Lord of the Rings. The budget for the series is expected to exceed $1 Billion.

Last October, Gordon hinted at the possibility of “both stellar feature-length and episodic” Narnia content. Here is everything we know about the Netflix productions.

Related:

• Netflix is Building a Narnia “Universe” | Talking Beasts

New episodes of Talking Beasts every 7th and 17th

Podcast Discussion: The Horse and His Boy, Ch. 11

C. S. Lewis was an atheist for much of his life because of all the suffering he observed in the world. The Horse and His Boy, of course, was written after Lewis’s conversion to Christianity. And, at the beginning of “The Unwelcome Fellow Traveller” chapter, Aslan finally appears and puts Shasta’s hardships in a larger context.

Listen to the discussion below and post a comment!

Related links:

• Video Review: The Horse and His Boy at The Logos Theatre
• Video: Letters from C. S. Lewis to Glumpuddle’s grandfather
• C. S. Lewis and The Problem of Pain: Lecture by Glumpuddle’s grandfather

Listen:

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Vodcast Episode

How well do you know The Chronicles of Narnia? Can you stump a NarniaWebber?

We are answering trivia questions submitted by listeners to determine who the Nerdiest NarniaWebber is!

Thanks to everyone who submitted questions for this episode! If your question did not make it into this show, it may appear in later episodes.

WATCH the video or just listen to the audio:

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Vodcast Discussion

We’re kicking off Season 4 of Talking Beasts: The Narnia Podcast with fresh thoughts on Netflix’s upcoming adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis.

In 2005, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe seemed like the obvious choice for the first Narnia movie. Nearly 15 years later… Netflix’s course may be less clear-cut.

“Wait… where’s the stump question?!” No stump question this time, but the next episode will have over 20 of them! Look for the video on March 17.

WATCH this episode above or listen below:

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While leading a Master Class at The Logos Theatre, Co-producer Douglas Gresham (stepson of C.S. Lewis) said a few words about Netflix’s upcoming adaptations of The Chronicles of Narnia.

NarniaWeb Spy Hogglestock writes:

[Gresham] didn’t say anything about feature-length movies but spoke positively about the multi-episode series because “you can put the whole book in.”

Also, he mentioned extrapolating action like the battle of Charn. He said it as if he were merely throwing out one possability. 

He said they were still in the negotiation stage with Netflix.

The official press release indicated Netflix is developing “both stellar feature-length and episodic programming.” No word on a release date.

Gresham is in Taylors, SC this week promoting The Logos Theatre’s stage adaptation of The Horse and His Boy.

Related:

• Netflix is Building a Narnia “Universe” | Talking Beasts
• David Magee Not Involved with Narnia on Netflix

This Friday, The Horse and His Boy will make its first appearance on a professional stage in the United States. Here is the first official photo of the completed Bree puppet with Shasta in costume.

Performances will run March 1 – April 27 at The Logos Theatre in Taylors, SC. Buy tickets or donate.

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Douglas Gresham (stepson of C. S. Lewis) will be speaking in Greenville, SC on Monday at approximately 7:00pm EST. Online viewers will be able to submit questions. This is an exclusive event for The Logos Theatre donors.

Viewers will also witness the unveiling of the Bree and Hwin puppets that will be used in The Horse and His Boy stage play, which premieres March 1.

How to participate:

• Donate $50 or more to The Logos Theatre’s stage production of The Horse and His Boy. (The premiere is next Friday, but they are still thousands of dollars short of their goal)
• Be sure to provide your real e-mail address.
• Click the livestream link, which will be sent via e-mail at approximately 6:30pm EST.
• Submit questions to Mr. Gresham!

This event will come days before a historic moment for Narnia: The first appearance of The Horse and His Boy on a professional stage in the United States. Douglas Gresham and many NarniaWebbers will be attending the premiere. Get tickets.

UPDATE: The event has ended.

Author: AJAiken

Amanda Aiken is a storyboard artist and animator in Scotland. She also co-edits Talking Beasts: The Narnia Podcast.

Despite animation being heavily used in many productions, bringing to life characters like Aslan, Reepicheep, and the Beavers, the idea of a fully-animated Narnia isn’t something that universally appeals.

Particularly in the West, there’s an attitude that animation is for children. No adults allowed! Even among filmmakers the medium can be seen as inferior, an opinion which not only overlooks the incredible amount of work which goes into animation but misses out on a beautiful and surprising art form.

Through a brief (and incomplete) look at the feature animation pipeline, I’ll explore what a new animated adaptation could bring to Narnia.

Story

In animation, storyboards and scripts are usually developed simultaneously. This allows for visuals to drive the story. With several board artists collaborating on each production, scenes and shots are passed from person to person. Every moment is planned and studied and discussed; often, it’s redrawn several times. That drawing will be taken to layout, where key poses are created. From those, each scene is animated. When the storyboards are edited together into an animatic with temporary voices and sound effects, it’s like watching the movie before it’s made. It’s the blueprint for the entire production. This gives a certainty live action can’t match when so much depends on the sets and locations, the weather, and what the actors had for breakfast. Though some live action directors do storyboard heavily, all animated films are 100% storyboarded as it’s such an integral part of the process. This is why live action sequences with visual effects have animatics, as the VFX animation has to be planned perfectly.

Creative Control

On the flip side, this method of development means a story can quickly deviate from initial ideas and source material. With films like The Princess and the Frog and How to Train Your Dragon, the original stories have been drastically changed (though both kept their core ideas). Howl’s Moving Castle is recognizable, but the story and themes are different. Of course, such transformations are present across all media, not animation alone.

In the case of Narnia, the C. S. Lewis estate and Douglas Gresham would have more of a say in the creation of a film. With such overseers it is unlikely that changes similar to those of the films above would be made. Yet changes do need to be made to translate a story from book to screen, and we’ve seen the good and bad of that across all the previous adaptations.

Joy

Where animation could really make a story from Narnia shine is in adapting moments that are closer in feel to the book. As Fantasia mentioned in her opinion piece, those moments of joy – like Lucy and Susan playing with Aslan, or the romp at the end of Prince Caspian – were cut by both the Walden and BBC adaptations despite being so memorable. Yet they’re a key indicator of what Narnia is to fans. Perhaps the problem is that taking these moments into live action seems a bit silly. How can you show a lion playing with little children and make it look fun and not terrifying? How can you show the riot and revel of the romp? Or the stately game of the Great Snow Dance?

One of my favourite animated sequences is the song “Colours of the Wind” in Pocahontas. I can’t imagine this in live action. If it were it would seem foolish, sappy, overblown. Animated, it’s powerful and beautiful. It has joy. How wonderful it would be to see any of those Narnia moments made, not necessarily in that style, but with that sincerity of emotion.

Style

Animation has been criticized for its caricature, including by C. S. Lewis:

I thought [Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs] almost inconceivably good and bad.

[…] The next worst [thing] was the faces of the dwarfs. Dwarfs ought to be ugly of course, but not in that way.

[…] But, all the terrifying bits were good, and the animals really most moving: and the use of shadows (of dwarfs and vultures) was real genius.’

C. S. Lewis to A. K. Hamilton (1939)

I would love to see a Narnia onscreen where the design of characters, backgrounds and colours are all created to fit the story that’s being told. In an animated film every element onscreen has to be designed and drawn or modelled, from a landscape in the background to a hairbrush. This is in no way disapproving of the incredible work by Weta Workshop and others but ensuring that such design is carried across the entire production and is not restricted to photo-real representations.

For The Secret of Kells, Cartoon Saloon drew extensively from the Book of Kells. The Celtic designs influence the entire film, from characters to the flat perspective. It’s a cohesive, and beautiful, whole. A recent film which also impressed me in this regard is Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse. Inspired by the comics in its use of colour, texture, layout, and character design, watching the film feels like reading a Spider-Man comic.

Imagine a film directly inspired by Pauline Baynes’ illustrations. So much of what I imagine of Narnia is taken from her drawings, and no adaptation yet has followed those designs. For me, this is the heart of why an animated Narnia could be so special.

Performance

One of the real strengths of animation is creating perfect acting for the perfect scene. Animation doesn’t require an actor to hit their mark at the same point over several takes. It’s planned, and changed over the course of the project, to tell the perfect story. This is such an assumed thing that bad acting is almost never mentioned when talking about animation. Instead what’s talked about is ‘bad animation’, a vague and hard-to-define term which is normally about awkward or unlikely movement.

Low-budget animation can have bad animation. Less money = less time = less planning, plus less able animators. Animation is expensive because it takes time; with less time, on low-budget or TV productions, it’s generally not as well made. There are exceptions, and there is excellent TV animation, but for an animated Narnia with a good story, good design, and good animation, I’d argue for a feature with a good budget.

C. S. Lewis

While complimenting a producer at the BBC on a recent Narnia radio adaptation, Lewis wrote:

But I am absolutely opposed—adamant isn’t in it!—to a TV version. Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare. At least, with photography. Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) wd. be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan wd. be to me blasphemy.’

C. S. Lewis to Lance Sieveking (1959)

It would be fascinating to know what Lewis’ views of the adaptations that have followed would have been. Like his opinions of Snow White, I imagine there would be parts he’d love and parts he’d hate in all of them.

What I take from his letters is that he greatly admired the art form of animation but was frustrated with Disney’s apparent disregard of mythology. I wonder what Lewis would have thought of The Secret of Kells and Song of the Sea. Both are steeped in myth and legend, with gorgeous use of colour and design to boot; perhaps he wouldn’t have liked the (deceptively) simple characters, though I think he may have appreciated the consistency in style.

The Future

However, there’s no point making an animated film just so it’s animated; no film should be made for the sake of it. I hope that, at some point, a director is inspired to make an animated Narnia movie because there are so many opportunities for storytelling in animation that go beyond any other medium. In the end, though, whether a Narnia adaptation is live action, animation, a stage play or anything else, what’s important is that it honours and grows out of the books.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the position of NarniaWeb.

Do you think Netflix should make an animated Narnia adaptation? Post a comment below!

Time is running out to submit trivia questions for the special “Stump a NarniaWebber” episode of Talking Beasts: The Narnia Podcast. We think this is going to be a lot of fun and we hope you will all participate!

Questions must be in by this Friday, February 15, 11:59pm EST.
Send here: narniaweb.com/stump. (No limit)

Selected questions will be posed to Rilian, Glumpuddle, and Dot in a competition to see which podcaster has the most Narnia knowledge! The video will be posted on March 17.

Anything Narnia-related is fair game. Books, movies, behind-the-scenes facts, filmmakers, actors, C.S. Lewis’ life, etc.

A note on difficulty level: Ideally, the answers should not be immediately obvious to a person who has read the books and seen the movies a couple times, but shouldn’t require a photographic memory ether. If you are unsure if a question is too difficult, making it multiple-choice might help. (If we edit your question, you will still receive credit on the show)