Silence is golden, unless you are a devotee waiting for information about an anticipated film. Narnia buffs have had to content themselves recently with getting excited about sparkles. The sparkles are on the new page linked to Narnia.com. When you mouse over the logo, you see some cool effects. The new official logo is much improved over the one that appeared on Jim Hill Media last June. (See Official(?) Dawn Treader Logo Seen.)
Disney had discontinued using the Narnia.com domain in April of last year (See Disney’s Narnia.com Off Line.), and it was assigned to the HarperCollins Prince Caspian page in May. Recently the new page has appeared with links to the official fan page on Facebook.
Fans are hopeful this means that some new online content (maybe including a video teaser) is in the works.
Well, we have to get excited about something!
Just before Thanksgiving, 2009, we reported that Paul Martin of NarniaFans.com had filed his first official movie blog entry in a planned series of exclusive news reports direct from the set of the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Paul’s “Chronicles of Narnia” Facebook page is now the official fan page for the movie. The introductory entry included a report from Ernie Malik, publicist for the movie, and official photos.
On Friday, January 29, 2009, the first production Blog entry direct from the set was added to the fan page. “Diving Right In” reports that actors Skandar Keynes (Edmund), Georgie Henley (Lucy), and Will Poulter (Eustace) were required to undergo scuba diving training in preparation for filming.
This training was necessary for the scene in which the three are spirited from a bedroom in England and end up in the sea to be rescued by King Caspian, who brings them safely aboard the Dawn Treader.
For more, see the Blog entry on Facebook here.
For several weeks now, Movie World has been giving tours at the Warner Brothers studio on the Gold Coast in Australia. Pictures from the sets of The Dawn Treader have been sent in to NarniaFans.com and NarniaWeb.com from fans who have snapped photos on the tour. (See the Examiner.com article, Dawn Treader tour pictures hitting fan sites.)
Some of the pictures are of mysterious statues around a bell tower. The towering figures are strange because the heads are detached from the bodies, and are being held in their hands.
Who do these mysterious statues represent?
One possible explanation is that the bell tower was built by King Caspian X (the Prince Caspian from the previous movie) to honor the previous Telmarine kings of Narnia. (The heads are crowned.) But this is just speculation.
What is even more mysterious is why these figures would be represented decapitated. It seems reminiscent of statues of beheaded saints (called cephalosporin) that are often depicted holding their heads. (See picture.) How this might fit with the story is anyone’s guess at this point.
Have an idea about what all this could mean? Please leave a comment below.
Picture is of a cephalophore of Saint Denis of Paris from Wikimedia.
The two biggest Narnia fans sites, NarniaWeb.com and NarniaFans.com, both posted today a quote by Michael Apted, who is directing the upcoming third installment in the Narnia series. Citing the Australian edition of Empire Magazine, both websites report the Dawn Treader director made the following comment during an interview that occurred on the set between scenes.
This is a lot more psychological; it’s not a big action movie. There are a lot of different locations and adventures but, apart from a huge battle at the end with a sea serpent and a dragon, this is a character story. The quality of the book, and the appeal of the book, is that it’s more of an emotional than a swashbuckling adventure.
Many fans are relieved that the movie will focus on the characters rather than relying on action scenes. This is indeed in keeping with the book by C S Lewis.
What doesn’t fit the book – at least from a literal standpoint – is “a huge battle at the end with a sea serpent and a dragon.” There are two dragons and a sea serpent in the book, but they are all toward the beginning. And there is a battle of sorts with the sea serpent, but not with the dragons.
So what will this battle scene involve, and how close to the end of the movie will it be? Will Eustace remain a dragon through much of the movie and fight the sea serpent toward the end?
For discussions of the Apted quote, check out the comments to the reports:
NarniaWeb.com – Empire Magazine (Australia) Talks Dawn Treader
NarniaFan.com – Empire Magazine Australia mentions Dawn Treader
A New Year’s Eve article in the Washington Times by Julia Duin expresses concerns by some in the Christian community about the direction the Narnia franchise is taking with its third film, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The article is rather confusing on several points.
The paragraph describing the various changes in dates for the release of Dawn Treader makes it sound like the delays only happened after Disney decided to pull out. Actually, some delays, due to the writers’ strike in 2008, and to the children’s schedules, had already been announced while Disney was involved. Problems with the drug wars in Mexico also prompted a change of filming venue to Australia.
That paragraph aside, the article causes further confusion by making certain unsubstantiated speculations.
First of all, Duin expresses doubt the “will and determination exist to finish the seven-part Narnia series.” This conclusion is reached from what she says are “weird remarks uttered by directors and producers of the first two films.” What remarks she is referencing are not specified.
On the contrary, since the success of the first movie, the filmmakers have continued to express that the series would continue to be produced as long as it received adequate support. The willingness of Walden to continue, even after Disney decided to discontinue its partnership in December of 2008, is also a strong indication of their intent.
The article goes on to reference C S Lewis step-son Douglas Gresham’s recent interview (citing a third-hand report) in which he is “ambivalent” to some changes made to the Dawn Treader script. (See Douglas Gresham interview on Dawn Treader causes stir and discussions on NarniaFans.com and HollywoodJesus.com.) It seems doubtful that Douglas Gresham’s comments mean that he “caved” to intense studio pressure. He does not express any animosity toward the studio for the changes they made, and indicates the themes of the book are still well conveyed.
Duin then quotes from an interview with Michael Apted by a New Zealand Christian radio station. She fails to mention the interview was conducted in the summer of 2007, just after Apted had signed to be director for Dawn Treader. (Transcripts are available in the NarniaFans archives and at WaldenFans.com.)
Apted talks about the challenges of making a film that is directed at both the conservative Christian base and the public at large. She and some in the Christian community object to this “even-handedness,” and are also concerned about the activist stands of some involved the project.
The article concludes with a quote from Ted Baehr, the publisher of the Christian magazine Movieguide and president of the Christian Film and TV Commission. A former script advisor had reportedly told Baehr the movie “was drifting from its Christian vision… not expressing the intent of C.S. Lewis…”
She also claims Baehr told her that an early script of The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe had “veered in a bizarre direction” and Dick Cook (President of Disney at the time) had to keep things from getting out of hand. However, this all seems to contradict what Baehr said in an article for WorldNetDaily last January. In comments about Disney pulling out of the franchise, he concluded
The Associated Press took my words out of context in an interview on this subject to make Disney’s decision look like one of the parties in Hollywood was concerned about the movie’s faith content. The fact is neither Disney nor Walden has hesitated from including faith in their movies. The book “Dawn Treader” has the least amount of time with Aslan, who is the Jesus figure in the series by acclaimed Christian author C.S. Lewis. It is much more logical that the economics of the movie did not make sense than that there was a concern over the Christian content of the book.
As “secular” as Walden and the other parties involved in this project may be, they are not afraid of the Christian faith. In fact, they seem to show much less prejudice toward Christianity than some Christians show toward them.
The C. S. Lewis Foundation has announced today that land has been purchased for the establishment of a C. S. Lewis College in Northfield, Massachusetts.
The former site of D. L. Moody’s Northfield Seminary for Young Women (later, the Northfield Mount Hermon High School) was purchased by Hobby Lobby Stores, Inc. for the school. (The High School recently had consolidated with their Mount Hermon campus.)
C. S. Lewis College is envisioned as a fully accredited ecumenical Christian institution of Great Books and Visual and Performing Arts. Plans are to matriculate the first class in the fall of 2012.
C. S. Lewis (1898-1963) is the author of The Chronicles of Narnia, the seven books on which the Walden Media series is based.
For more information: See the official website, CSLewisCollege.org, and the announcement on the C.S. Lewis Foundation website, CSLewis.org.
Peter Jackson’s extended edition of The Lord of the Rings and Walden Media’s The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe made Britain’s Daily Mail’s “list of Noughties’ 50 best movies.” The list was published by MailOnline earlier today, December 11, 2009.
Grouping the three Lord of the Rings movies together, Jackson’s films came in at number 1, and are lauded as “the greatest cinematic trilogy ever.”
The Narnia movie was ranked at 15, and is described as
A wonderful realisation of C.S. Lewis’s children’s classic which captures everything good about the novel, including its charm, sense of wonder and feeling for myth.
The next decade with see more from Walden’s version of Narnia and Jackson’s version of Middle-earth – the land JRR Tolkien invented. Walden has just recently finished filming The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, based on Lewis’s third-published Narnia novel. The movie is scheduled for theaters in December of 2010. Jackson has begun casting for two movies based on Tolkien’s The Hobbit. These are slated for December 2011 and December 2012.
For a complete list of the 50 movies on the list, see click here.
An interview with Douglas Gresham, Narnia author C S Lewis’s step-son and executive producer for the Walden Media Chronicles of Narnia movie series, has made quite a stir.
The interview was published on YourStoryPodcast.com, an Australian website, earlier today (December 6, 2009). The interviewer was Ian Kath, who worked as a prop maker for the Voyage of the Dawn Treader movie.
The podcast is mostly about Gresham’s life, including his Christian philosophy, but some comments about the upcoming movie have some fans nervous about the direction the filmmakers are taking the story. When asked how the movie might be different than the book, Gresham had this to say:
Well, The Lion the Witch and The Wardrobe was very close to the original book because the book was written in such a way that lent itself to being transcribed into the film medium. Prince Caspian we had to make some fairly major changes because the book isn’t written that way. In this movie there are a lot of differences in it also to, as Hollywood says, “derive the plot”. I’m ambivalent as to whether they’re necessary or not, I don’t really think so. But that’s the way they wanted to do it, and it was either that or not make a movie, so I said “Well, go ahead and do it.” It will be very interesting to see the audience’s reactions.
On NarniaFans.com, Brian Sibley, who adapted the Chronicles for BBC’s Radio4, left a comment that the “changes made to ‘Prince Caspian’ were enough for me, I shan’t be bothering with the ‘Dawn Treader’.” (Sibley has also written a couple books about Narnia – The Land of Narnia and The Treasury of Narnia.)
Paul Martin, who has run the NarniaFan.com site for several years, responded to Mr. Sibley:
I find the story that they are telling to be the story of the book, with a few minor additions to get the ball rolling, as well as to keep it PG-rated. I don’t think it’s a drastic re-ordering of sequences like with Prince Caspian. … This one stays much closer to the source material (in a Harry Potter / Lord of the Rings fashion) than did Caspian. I do agree that a book that’s been well loved for 57 years shouldn’t need much change for the big screen, and they haven’t done so much to it, that I have seen. The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is being seen as a return to the magic of Narnia by all involved. They say that it has much more of a feel of “The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” and stays much closer to the source material.
In the interest of full disclosure, it should be noted that Martin is involved in promoting the film; he also runs the official Facebook fan page. However, detractors such as Sibley seem not to understand what it takes to adapt a book into a movie.
Also mentioned in the podcast is that Gresham is pushing to have The Silver Chair made as the next movie if Dawn Treader meets with success.
To listen to the entire podcast on YourStoryPodcast.com, click here. Besides the information about Dawn Treader, the interview contains some great insights on Douglas Gresham and a few tidbits about C S Lewis.
For the report on NarniaFans.com, see ‘Your Story’ Interview with Douglas Gresham on Narnia Films.
There is also a discussion on NarniaWeb.com: Big Interview with Douglas Gresham
November 29, 1898, 111 years ago today, C S Lewis, the famous Christian apologist and author of The Chronicles of Narnia, was born in Belfast, Ireland. (Lewis died the same day as John F Kennedy in 1963, just short of his sixty-fifth birthday.)
Lewis would grow up to become a professor of English at Oxford University, and later Cambridge, in England. While teaching at Oxford, Lewis struck up a friendship with J R R Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, who was instrumental in the conversion of the previously avowed atheist to Christianity.
It was Tolkien who made the number 111 famous in The Fellowship of the Ring, the first volume of The Lord of the Rings “trilogy.” The book begins with Bilbo’s “eleventy-first” birthday.
Tolkien himself turned 111 (posthumously) on January 3, 2003.
Today Paul Martin, who is the webmaster at NarniaFans.com, filed his first official movie blog entry in a planned series of exclusive news reports direct from the set of the movie The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader.
These will not be the kinds of canned pieces you’d find on “traditional” outlets. Instead, you’ll be getting unfiltered reports from and about the filmmakers, as they work tirelessly to bring all the magic of C.S. Lewis’ beloved story and characters to the big screen.
Paul’s “Chronicles of Narnia” Facebook page is now the official fan page for the movie.
The first report is by Ernie Malik, publicist for the movie. He writes about the inscription at the base of the mast. The inscription serves a dual purpose.
The first purpose is to add a bit of “authenticity” to the ship, even though the inscription will never be shown close up in the movie. The words are the dedication of the ship by King Caspian in honor of those who built the ship for him: “All Narnians, with grateful hearts may we give thanks to the crew of the mighty Dawn Treader for their strong minds and artisan hands”
The second purpose is to recognize all the hard work put into designing and building the ship set for the film.
See the complete report and more studio pictures on the official Dawn Treader Facebook fan page.
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