Christmas: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

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If you are looking for a fantasy film to watch with the family at Christmas time, there are few better choices out there than The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, directed by Andrew Adamson and released in December 2005. Admittedly, each movie in Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings trilogy came out in December (2001, 2002, and 2003), and Jackson’s films are superior. (Some Tolkien fans even recommend watching The Two Towers early in Advent and The Return of the King around New Year’s Day.) Yet, unlike The Lord of the Rings, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is, in part, a Christmas movie (as I have argued briefly before). The Christian holiday’s themes and imagery are central to the meaning of C. S. Lewis’s series of children’s books (they are not truly novels, but that’s for another time), and Adamson and the other screenwriters (Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely) keep Christmas themes and imagery central to this adaptation.

In the film, as in the book, the wicked White Witch’s (Tilda Swinton) reign of terror has cursed Narnia with a Long Winter: “Always winter and never Christmas,” the faun Mr. Tumnus (a delightful James McAvoy) laments to Lucy (Georgie Henley), the little girl from our world who first goes through the magic wardrobe into this other world. Narnia is initially portrayed as a wild, rocky forest covered in hard frost and deep snow. The film realizes the famous images of the lamppost lighting up the winter forest, with the snow falling softly and a faun with a red scarf carrying parcels and an umbrella—images that are so evocative of Christmas memories of walks and shopping, as much as anything else.

In Narnia, Lucy and her three Pevensie siblings—Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), and Edmund (Skandar Keynes)—will join up with talking animals and other fantastical creatures in a great resistance against the White Witch. They hear rumours about the great Lion, Aslan, the Son of the Emperor from across the sea, who is coming, who is on the move, and who will set all things right. The film retains the scene in which the coming of this anticipated saviour-king accords with the return of Father Christmas to Narnia, after a long absence. He gives the Pevensie children Christmas presents suitable for their dangerous circumstances: weapons and magic potion instead of toys.

The film’s insistence on retaining the Christmas elements shows that Andrew Adamson fundamentally understands this story (I might not say the same about the sequel Prince Caspian though). There are other aspects of the film that I have mixed feelings about as an intense admirer of Lewis’s children’s books (and as a father who enjoys reading them aloud to his kids). Mr. and Mrs. Beavers’ banter (voiced by Ray Winstone and Dawn French) is often annoying, playing less like Lewis’s characters and more like conventional animated side-kicks (recalling Lewis’s own reported concern about Disney eventually making an adaptation of his books). As much as Tilda Swinton’s performance as the White Witch was praised upon the film’s release, her performance only captures half of the character in the book. Swinton conveys well the powerful, ferocious nature of a witch with super-human powers and a hatred for goodness, but when we first meet her, her Snow Queen lacks the beguiling, stern beauty which is a factor in Edmund being seduced by her (Jadis’s cruel beauty is underscored in the prequel book, The Magician’s Nephew). 

On the plus side, the children’s performances actually fill out the Pevensies’ characters as written on the page. Lewis’s books do not have fully rounded characterizations—Lucy and, most of all Edmund, are the fullest—and Lewis’s interest is only occasionally on conveying the interiority of a principal character. 

The film’s extension of the book’s portrayal of battles, and the added in action sequences, have long been the subject of debate. I came away from the film back in 2005 fearing that Lewis’s simple story had been swamped with combat. In retrospect, I think it delivers what audiences of a blockbuster film adaptation expect, but I’ll take the action scenes one at a time. 

The film opens with combat: the German aerial bombing of London during the Blitz of 1940. I originally disliked this prologue, but now I see it serves a purpose: it vividly explains to audiences why the kids must flee to the countryside away from their parents, and go live with the professor (Jim Broadbent) who has the wardrobe in his big country manor. It’s probably worse in 2024, but I understand that you cannot expect mass audiences, especially full of kids, to understand without much explanation the context of World War II. The vivid opening scene works better than title cards explaining this context. Remember, Lewis’s books were written within the decade after the war ended. What is more, the WWII prologue further links our world to Narnia, connecting the Battle of Britain to the struggles between good and evil in that fantasy world (are there allusions to the 2000s Wars on Terror there too?).

The least effective action addition is the escape from the wolves across the river, formerly frozen and now with its ice breaking up in the new spring. The whole scene is a bit overdone, and it also seems to resemble aspects of another film addition to a fantasy story: Arwen’s confrontation with the Black Riders in The Fellowship of the Ring. In both films, big waves sweep the chasers away. 

Also, as much as I like Father Christmas’s presence in the film, I don’t need his introduction through an elaborate false climax, with swooping helicopter shots of the children and beavers running from a sled they think is the White Witch’s. I know the book picks up on the characters’ fear that the sleigh bells they hear are actually from the Witch’s sled, and not Santa’s, but the way the sequence is extended too closely resembles the construction that Peter Jackson favours too much in his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Build, build—surprise, it wasn’t the baddies! I think a different approach would have worked better here.

The big final battle actually works very well. In general, I would describe it as not really straying from, but rather expanding on, the thin lines and brief suggestions in Lewis’s book. The final battle is a fitting retelling of these events for cinema, and it also capitalizes on all the wonderful visual possibilities of combat in a world of mix-matched talking beasts and fantastical creatures facing off. Polar bears pull the Witch’s chariot. Griffins swoop down like diving fighter planes.

With the hindsight of these many years, my take on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe as an adaptation can be summed up thusly: we can see that the film catches great moments, has some fumbles, yet delivers the magical core of the story. It understands Aslan’s magic, and why these stories are repeated.

The most powerful scene in the movie is the killing of Aslan. Here, Swinton’s casting is perfect, as she and her wardrobe team are able to channel the atmosphere of pagan ritual that the film’s production design leans into. The Stone Table has elements of Stonehenge in its visualization. The scene invokes the Old Law based on honour and blood. The menagerie of baddies, most of them done with costumes or animatronics, look impressive, inventive, and varied—perhaps coming the closest of anything in the movie to capturing the strange attraction of many of Pauline Bayne’s detailed woodcut-style illustrations. People at the time noted that, as this film was marketed towards evangelical Christians to emulate the success of the 2004’s The Passion of the Christ, this scene was “The Passion of the Lion.” The echoes are certainly there, with the torchlit scene of mocking, beating, and cruelty recalling those scenes in Mel Gibson’s film when Christ is brought before the Sanhedrin.

Adamson’s achievement is that we feel the terror and sorrow when the Witch executes the Lion; it is rare and haunting for a figure like this to be subjected to such treatment on screen in a family movie. But these dark feelings are also necessary for the film to achieve the wonder and joy at Aslan’s resurrection. In this sense, the film smartly does not flinch from repeating the archetypal, even allegorical, aspects of this part of Lewis’s story. It’s the heart of the story, after all. And it makes the movie just as much an Easter movie as a Christmas movie, with its portrayal of spring’s arrival and Aslan’s death and resurrection.

Returning to Andrew Adamson’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe almost two decades later shows that aspects of this first film (of three) have aged well, but it also clarifies how much the tone and storytelling and setting of this film resemble Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings (the film was even shot primarily on location in New Zealand, like Jackson’s films). As much as I like this movie, I find it hard to separate it from its original context, as another entry in the 2000s Hollywood fantasy boom and one deeply indebted to Jackson’s works. It is also a production that sought to capitalize on other cultural phenomena, such as evangelical support for a popular movie, if it was properly pitched to them. As much as the film works, it exudes aspects that make the production seem calculated and very much of its time, rather than timeless.

Thus, although I’m more confident that this is a fine film today than I was upon its release, this isn’t my ideal adaptation of Narnia. Nevertheless, it is better than any number of fantasy movies out there—it is comfortably second-tier fantasy filmmaking—and a worthy part of your family’s Christmas viewing program.

7 out of 10

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005, UK/USA).

Directed by Andrew Adamson; screenplay by Ann Peacock and Andrew Adamson and Christopher Markus & Stephen McFeely; starring William Moseley, Anna Popplewell, Skandar Keynes, Georgie Henley, Tilda Swinton, James McAvoy, Jim Broadbent, Ray Winstone, Dawn French, and Liam Neeson.

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