According to this report, Disney's skipping out on The Voyage of The Dawn Treader. This is probably not bad news, since Prince Caspian could hardly be said to be a faithful rendering of the book. It was more like "Featuring names and a dimly similar story sort of inspired by the book." So I'm thinking we couldn't do much worse with a new studio involved, assuming Walden Media wasn't to blame for the license taken in Prince Caspian (this is not to say that I disliked the movie entirely, but it was disappointing).
I'm willing to give them another shot at it. If they botch up Dawn Treader, though, I might not be able to get over it. It's one of my favorite books in the series, right from the very first line ("There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it." LOL!), past Dragon Island, the Dufflepuds, and the Last Sea, to Aslan the Lamb. I just won't be able to bear any abuse to this story.
2 comments:
Whew! As my girls re-re-read the series they ask me what my favorite book is: TVDT is the one. Sadly I think Walden is mostly to blame as the studios only care about the money...even LOTR missed the Christologic implications of that book, and he was a fan.
Martin
Hi Martin,
Yeah, I'm trying to pretend that Walden isn't the force behind the botch job. I want to have some basis for hope at least for now :-) For example, Disney might have told them that the story for Prince Caspian just had to have all these changes, or it wouldn't sell. They might have told them that all that Christian moralizing and allegorizing needed to be ejected, or the movie wouldn't appeal to enough non-Christians. After all, Disney has been hacking up classic stories (like, for example, Pinocchio) for decades.
In this way I console myself and try to prop up some hope. :-)
As for the LOTR movies...since they weren't intended to be an allegory, and weren't intended to be "about" anything but themselves (as Tolkien said in the foreword to the Fellowship of the Ring), I don't think that they suffered as much. Maybe Peter Jackson's appreciation for them helped in that respect. I agree that they are very Catholic stories, of course, but they were less prone to damage than allegories are, it seems to me, because if you screw up part of an allegory, you probably screw up the whole allegory.
Anyway, that's more than my $0.02. :-)
RdP
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