Earthling

He's not a tame CG lion

[ posted by the philosopher ]

Reuters is reporting that a newly published letter written decades ago by C.S. Lewis shows that the author wouldn't have approved of Disney's new movie adaptation. Alas, it's a simple-minded snippet of journalism that completely fails to do its job.

C.S. Lewis... was "absolutely opposed" to a live action version of his stories...

Although Lewis, who died in 1963, said he would have considered a cartoon version, his letter suggests he is unlikely to have approved of Disney's interpretation, particularly its computer-generated Aslan.

"Anthropomorphic animals, when taken out of narrative into actual visibility, always turn into buffoonery or nightmare -- at least with photography," he wrote.

"Cartoons (if only Disney did not combine so much vulgarity with his genius!) would be another matter. A human, pantomime, Aslan would be, to me, blasphemy."

Well, that seems clear enough: Lewis' beef with the concept of a live-action Narnia was that photographic renditions of anthropomorphic animals "always" look absurd. A reasonable stand for him to take -- given that he died in 1963. I dare say if he'd lived to see Jurassic Park, he'd have paused at least briefly to wonder what 21st-century animation technology might be able to do with the denizens of Narnia.

How is it possible that both a reporter and an editor at Reuters are unable to grasp the basic concept that a "computer-generated Aslan" is a cartoon, albeit an incredibly sophisticated one? Especially with it staring them right in the face that Lewis admired Disney's artistic achievements, and the new movie is a Disney movie?

Now, it might be that by "absurd," Lewis didn't mean "unrealistic," he meant "too realistic." Perhaps his point was that a real talking lion, no matter how magnificent, could not help but appear unsettling rather than divine, by the very "wrongness" of its nature, and that the visual abstraction of classic cartooning makes the idea of an anthropomorphic animal more palatable by placing it in an equally abstracted world.

Yeah, maybe -- but it doesn't say all that in the letter, and it sure doesn't say that in the Reuters story.

29 November 2005 at 11:54 AM | permalink | 3 comments

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