It looks like the neo-con Christians are pedalling narnia as an antidote to Harry Potter (see the link)
For all the brilliance of hi teck animation this film is crap.
It is crap because Lewis' Narnia is crap.
His characters make Blyton's famous five look really dynamic. They are very pale shadows of Harry and co.
What really annoys me about Narnia is that there is no real learning here for the children. they escape to a fake Christian Fantasy worlf which lacks the complexity of the real world we live in.
While you come away from Potter knowing evil is a part of you, you come away from Narnia thinking it is probably just the other person's problem.
Yuk.
AlterNet: MediaCulture: Marketing Narnia: "What Lewis did understand as a theologian was what he already knew as a literary critic and fantasy writer: that the imagination was a crucial human apparatus. Thus his response, his theodicy perhaps, to the terrors of the second war, and its effects on the childhood psyche was to create an alternative world, a land only accessible via the banality of a wardrobe and the richness of a child's imagination. Lewis' greatest theological contribution was to posit imagination in the face of evil. Lewis' theology was therefore naturally concerned with myth. And here is where he cannot be fully appropriated by the kind of evangelicalism that is buying up copies of Mere Christianity."
2 comments:
What really annoys me about Narnia is that there is no real learning here for the children. they escape to a fake Christian Fantasy worlf which lacks the complexity of the real world we live in.
I disagree, there are some moral lessons within the story. For example when one of the children, through greed, betrays the beavers and the other children, etc.
Greed or will to power. There is a moral dimension, I do not question that. what i am saying is that it lacks the ambiguity of real life. Compared to Harry Potter and co they are two dimensional.
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