Is There Hope for Netflix Narnia?
I have some fairly serious doubts about it but is there perhaps a ray or two of sunshine to be found behind what are the admittedly fairly ominous clouds surrounding the Netflix series of films?
The showrunner is Mathew Aldritch. A quick scan of his IMDB page reveals that he was the writer of Coco.
Yay!
Sadly, he was also one of the writers on Lightyear.
aww.
So that is kind of a fifty-fifty chance. He appears to have left Pixar about a year after John Lassetter got the boot. And Lightyear may well have started as something that didn’t suck before Stories Matter and Reimagine Tomorrow got their leprous fingers on it.
Then there is the first director of the first film.
It will be Greta Gerwig’s project. She’s currently the savior of Hollyweird so she can do anything she likes provided she keeps the budget below $150 million. Barbie was ludicrously Woke crap however, it did start life under the Ann Sarnoff regime at Warner Brothers when everything was Woke crap. It would serve us better to look at one of her more serious efforts.
Little Women (2019) was excellent. Gerwig demonstrated some real chops as a director. Most versions of the Little Women (and there are more of those than a Women’s Studies class has genders) are fairly static in their composition. Gerwig did something different by keeping most of the characters and camera shots in motion providing a dynamic subtext appropriate to the March Sisters age. The critical and audience praise for this version is quite genuine and rather deserved.
But Gerwig significantly changed the ending of Little Women.
The climax in every other version, (to Alcott’s) is Jo’s engagement. Gerwig provided a much more feminist-friendly ending where the climax is the publication of Jo’s book. Gerwig’s defense of this is that Jo March was acknowledged as being semi-autobiographical by Louisa May Alcott and Alcott herself never married. Additionally, Jo spends pretty much the entire story talking about how she has no desire to marry.
This is actually a more credible defense than you usually get these days but as a writer, I find it unacceptable. Alcott’s authorial intent was broken for what at the end of the day is the feminist lie of finding true fulfillment only in pursuing a career without family or children. Alcott herself was rebelling against conventions of literature by having Jo pick the duller, unromantic choice of the poor educator. Yes, there is a passage in Alcott’s journal that says she doesn’t want Jo to marry but the date puts it early in the novel’s development.
Frankly, there seems little doubt that Alcott herself never married because she was herself a lesbian. The character of Jo March was not.
So while Gerwig seems willing to respect a classic work of literature, she won’t hesitate to “Put her own spin on it” for the sake of feminism. Hopefully, she won’t be allowed anywhere near Susan.
Darklings: Kind of hard to do if she’s directing The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
The Dark Herald: She’s not. Netflix’s first movie in the series is going to be The Silver Chair
Yeah, they are starting with the fourth book. This is a real headscratcher. I could understand starting with The Magician’s Nephew. As a purist myself, I dislike the idea but if I was a TV executive who is interested in keeping things coherent for Culturalists and Flirts who haven’t read the books but were pulled in by the hype. A chronological telling of the tale makes sense from that regard.
Admittedly, that probably means the deletion of A Horse and His Boy. While I enjoyed that book too, it’s a major speed bump in a long-form narrative about the extended Pevensie family. So again, it’s arguable.
But I can’t see a point to starting with The Silver Chair Unless they plan to undermine the tragedy of the first act and have Eustice meet Caspian before the ancient king heads off. It can be brute forced into a starting point then but it’s a terrible idea.
Now if there was a problem with film rights I could understand it. Wardrobe and Caspian were made by Disney and not all that long ago. Dawn Treader wasn’t released by Disney but was released by 20th Century Fox which is another way of saying Disney owns it now.
The thing is from what I’ve read this production company has the rights to all seven of the Chronicles of Narnia. Still, it is such a weird choice I’m betting on the rights issue.
What about the production company itself? Well, it’s Netflix. So… Yeah.
Netflix has delivered garbage to be sure, but it has recently acquired a track record for delivering quality. Certainly, one that is much better than Disney’s.
I realize I’ve only given you reasons to hope all is not yet lost.
But you are probably wondering, is anything that approaches affirmative grounds for hope?
Well, there is one now. From That Park Place:
Douglas Gresham, Lewis’ stepson, also stated, “It is wonderful to know that folks from all over are looking forward to seeing more of Narnia, and that the advances in production and distribution technology have made it possible for us to make Narnian adventures come to life all over the world.”
“Netflix seems to be the very best medium with which to achieve this aim, and I am looking forward to working with them towards this goal,” he added.
I’ve been waiting for any statement from Gresham at all. There hasn’t been one until now. Gresham has a track record for being as ferociously protective of his stepfather’s work as Christopher Tolkien was of his father’s. While he doesn’t have the legal rights that Christopher Tolkien had, he does have the power of his own word. Which he has withheld up until now. His new advisory capacity gives me some grounds for optimism. It’s restrained optimism to be sure but it is there.
Which is nice for a change.
