Is That Lion the King of Kings?

(USA Today) – The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a beloved children's book about four British school-children who pass through the back of a wardrobe into an enchanted land where a witch has made it eternally winter. There they meet Aslan, the lion of the title, who offers his own life to the witch to atone for the treachery of one of the siblings. On Dec. 9, a $150 million movie version will open nationwide, reigniting an old debate: Is the world created by British author C.S. Lewis a rip-roaring piece of fantasy – or a fairy tale suffused with Christian imagery? The answer is both, and that raises a related question: Can Disney succeed by selling the movie on two tracks – as a sort of cross between The Lord of the Rings and The Passion of the Christ? If so, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe figures to be a holiday blockbuster. Walden Media made the movie, and Disney came in as a partner to distribute and sell it. A multi-tiered marketing cam-paign targets, among others, fantasy fans and churchgoers, groups not usually known for being on the same wavelength. "My reading of the situation is Disney came to realize, 'Goodness, we have a two-fer here,' " says Alan Jacobs, a professor at Wheaton College. "We can draw in those millions of people who want heroic fan-tasy, but then we can also tap into those thousands of churches that can sell out theaters." The cycle of seven Narnia books is approaching 100 million in sales since Wardrobe was published in 1950. The trick for the movie will be pleasing old fans, many of whom are drawn to the Christian imagery, while attracting new ones, some of whom could resent it. "I don't want to sound greedy or sound like a producer saying, 'We're for every-body,' " producer Mark Johnson says. "But we are. That's the genius of C.S. Lewis: The story works on so many levels."

The book has long charmed children of any or no religion. The movie is, in many ways, faithful to the book without sounding the horn of religious orthodoxy. Johnson says you will find Christian symbolism in the movie only if you found it in the book. But the book is no staid Sunday school lesson: It is a rousing adventure tale that stands on its own, with echoes of larger themes that reverberate in young minds even when children are unsure of the source of the echoes. Bruce Edwards, a professor of English at Bowling Green University, says, "With Lewis, the story is the thing. You ought to read the lines first. Then you can read between them."

The lion's share of the film's marketing budget – reputedly $80 million – has been spent on saturation TV ads, but lesser amounts have been spent on grass-roots marketing to schools, libraries and youth groups. Johnson says just 5% was spent wooing churchgoers, but the press coverage has centered on faith-based marketing. Motive Marketing, which promoted The Passion of the Christ to a $370.6 million box office take last year, is among the companies that have sold Wardrobe directly to churches as a sort of greatest children's story ever told, complete with Sunday school lesson plans. That spadework almost certainly ensures a big opening weekend. Plans are afoot for Prince Caspian, which will be the next Narnia movie if Wardrobe succeeds. The Christian symbolism becomes more obvious in some of the later books, particularly in the last one, The Last Battle, a retelling of Revelation. Near the end, Lewis makes it clear that in his cosmology heaven is open to the good of all faiths.Other surprises come near the end of The Last Battle – including perhaps the most auda-cious plot twist in children's literature. Bowling Green's Edwards, author of Not-a-Tame Lion, wishes moviego-ers could see the film as the books' original readers read them, with no prompting from marketers or preach-ers. "This movie deserves an audience that has an ability to have the characters and the themes sneak up on them – or, as in Lewis' phrase, sneak past their watchful dragons," Edwards says. "I think the dragons are way too watchful on this one." Andrew Adamson, the film's director, seconds that emotion. He read the books as a child in New Zealand and received no instruction on deeper meaning. He hopes American children will come to his movie similarly unencumbered. "I read the books before I even knew what allegory meant, and I enjoyed them purely as an adventure," he says. "That's how the film should be enjoyed, too."