by Rhian Hibner
Daily Lobo
There is nothing quite like a well-made children's movie.
If a movie can manage to make its viewers feel like they're 10-year-olds again, someone has done something right. In the case of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," director Andrew Adamson has done several things right.
The casting is done well, and all the actors fit their roles. The children in this film are very convincing. Any flaws in their acting can be attributed to inexperience. This is the first real film any of them have played in, with the exception of Anna Popplewell.
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The other casting choices are excellent. Though he is a bit of a surprising choice for the voice of Aslan, Liam Neeson's performance is impeccable. It can't be easy to make a talking lion believable, but Neeson manages to pull it off. Likewise, the performance of the other voice actors is similar. Both amusing and convincing is the beaver with the Cockney accent voiced by Ray Winstone. British actress Tilda Swinton is perfectly evil in the role of the White Witch.
The cinematography is well executed. Each shot is deftly framed, and the pacing of the film keeps the viewer interested. The animals in the film stand out, not because they look like computer animation, but because they don't. The rendering of their movements is absolutely convincing, perhaps because live animals were used to create the motion-captured animations. Peter Jackson's Weta Studios deserve high recognition.
The only problem is that New Zealand was where the movie was filmed. The scenery is great, but combined with the special effects, the viewer is left with a Middle Earth feel. This is somewhat unfortunate, but not that big of a problem. C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were close friends, and you can see the influence they had on each other in their respective works.
Amazingly, the script is close to the book, scene for scene. While some of the lines are altered, not one event in the novel is left out. The characters behave in exactly the same way they do in the novel. None of the silliness commonly observed in cinema renditions of children's literature can be seen here. For that, you can thank Adamson, who has taken this film seriously. Despite being distributed by Disney, the more violent portions of the book have been preserved intact.
Adamson and his cast have delivered a first-rate movie. Everything in this film fits together within its time restraints and still manages to get C.S. Lewis's message across. All too often this type of story does not fare well in the transition to the silver screen. It's nice to see the stories of childhood properly done.
