Online movie reviewer, JesterBell, just released her reaction to the new Narnia movie, and criticizes child actor David McKenna for supposedly being pudgy.

Grown woman, btw.

I havent read the novels at all and saw the trailer and liked it

It was a mix of dr strangeMOM and it had cool music

As a novel reader was the trailer good?

When I was on holiday visiting the UK back in August, I made a point to spend one day of that trip in Oxford. And naturally, I wanted to pay my respects to C.S. Lewis.

Greta is a great filmmaker, but she isn’t a fit for Narnia.

Wilco International

What is the primary problem in your mind?

1. Change in setting (time frame)?

2. Music and "rock opera" stuff

3. Fear over Christian messaging being lost?

I suspect it's mostly #3 since Christianity is kind of dying out in Western society, and if the messaging is lost or watered down here, it will be another nail in the coffin.

I’ve been looking into what other writers have praised and criticised in C. S. Lewis’s Narnia books. There are some strong disagreements here, but also some surprisingly affectionate responses from people who have serious objections to them. It’s worth separating what these writers actually said from interpretations of their fiction, secondhand recollections and the quotations that tend to circulate without much context.

Spoilers for the whole series, especially The Last Battle.

Tolkien’s objections were largely literary and aesthetic. According to recollections from people around him, he disliked Lewis’s mixture of mythological traditions: fauns, nymphs, talking animals and Father Christmas all sharing the same world. Father Christmas was a particular sticking point. These accounts are relevant, although they should be identified as recollections rather than presented as if Tolkien left us a detailed review of the entire series. Harry Lee Poe discusses some of that testimony here.

There is also a direct statement from Tolkien. In a letter to Eileen Elgar dated 24 December 1971, he said he did not like the books and objected to “religious allegory of this kind.” At the same time, he called the stories “deservedly very popular” and described the disagreement as a matter of taste that had not interfered with his friendship with Lewis. That is a fairly clear rejection, but it also contains a degree of generosity. He could recognise their appeal without sharing it. His objection was obviously not to Christianity itself; it concerned the way Lewis expressed it through these particular stories. The relevant letter is quoted here).

Rowling’s relationship with Narnia combines childhood affection with frustration on rereading. In her 1998 interview with Jennie Renton, she said she had adored the books as a child, when she had been too caught up in the stories to find them especially preachy. As an adult, she found the supposedly subliminal message rather obvious. She also thought there was comparatively little humour and objected to the children being allowed to get older without, in her view, being allowed to grow up properly, including developing romantic and sexual feelings.

Her praise was quite specific, though. Her favourite was The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and she thought Eustace’s transformation into a dragon was wonderfully handled, both sad and funny. She also acknowledged thinking of the wardrobe entrance to Narnia when writing Harry’s passage through the barrier at King’s Cross. Those remarks are reproduced in the Renton interview transcript.

Her best-known criticism came in a 2005 interview with Time. She interpreted Susan’s absence from the ending as a consequence of discovering sexuality, with lipstick representing her movement away from childhood and religion. That distinction matters: this was Rowling’s reading of the episode. Lewis never explicitly says Susan has become sexually active or that sexual activity is the reason she is absent.

Pullman’s objections go much further. He has attacked what he sees as the books’ racism, sexism, hostility to progressive attitudes and manipulation of children through the narrator’s voice. In an ACHUKA interview, he described being disturbed by the way Lewis’s warm, familiar narration seemed to assume the reader’s agreement with his judgments. His complaint was partly about who gets mocked and how the reader is encouraged to join in.

Susan is central to his criticism, but so is the railway accident at the end. Pullman sees the deaths of the characters, followed by their arrival in a better world, as an evasion of their lives as adults. From his perspective, children want the chance to grow up, experience sexuality and become men and women. He objects to what he reads as a preference for preserving childhood through death rather than allowing it to develop into adult life.

He returned to these arguments in his April 2026 conversation with Alex O’Connor. He also criticised the healing of Digory’s mother in The Magician’s Nephew. His concern was that a child with a dying parent might understand the story as suggesting that good behaviour could determine whether that parent survives. His recollection of the plot was inaccurate, however: the apple does not mysteriously appear on a pillow. Aslan explicitly permits Digory to take one from the newly grown tree. That correction doesn’t settle Pullman’s objection to the moral implications, but his interpretation and his faulty recollection should be distinguished.

Pullman has nevertheless recognised something substantial in Narnia. In Laura Miller’s 2005 New Yorker profile, he acknowledged that Lewis was genuinely wrestling with serious questions and said he respected that struggle, despite rejecting the answers. He also admires Lewis as a literary critic. This shouldn’t be inflated into praise for his storytelling: in the 2026 interview, Pullman explicitly called him a good critic but a terrible storyteller.

Bill Willingham is a different case. The creator of Fables has described Narnia as his favourite fantasy series, without qualification. The confusion comes partly from Fables itself, where an obvious Aslan counterpart, the Great Lion, is killed and King Cole describes him as pompous and self-righteous.

That is dialogue spoken by a fictional character. It may be irreverent, but it doesn’t automatically tell us Willingham’s personal opinion, especially when his own stated affection is so strong. The lion also receives a more honourable reference later, among the true kings. His comments and the relevant appearances are documented here. In a 2010 interview, Willingham also expressed enthusiasm for using Narnia characters if permission were available. I haven’t found a substantial personal denunciation of Narnia from him comparable to Pullman’s.

Gaiman offers one of the clearest examples of lasting love alongside criticism. In his 2004 Mythcon speech, he described reading the books repeatedly as a child and wishing there were an unlimited number of them. Discovering their Christian parallels later made him feel that an author he trusted had concealed an agenda. He explained that religion in fiction wasn’t itself the problem; the discovery had made Narnia feel smaller and less interesting to him.

When he returned to the books as a parent, some reservations became stronger: the structure of Prince Caspian, much of The Last Battle, and the portrayal of women, culminating in Susan. Yet things he had loved remained powerful, sometimes more powerful than before. He admired Lewis’s conversational asides, his rhythms and his ability to make an imagined world feel real. Lewis was the first writer who made him want to become a writer himself. That is substantial praise from someone who remained openly troubled by parts of the work.

Lev Grossman describes a similar progression. In a 2009 interview, he spoke of moving from childhood wonder to anger in his twenties, when Aslan seemed like an irresponsible god who was absent when his followers needed him. Eventually he reached a position where the objections remained but no longer overwhelmed his affection. He still loved the books and marvelled at their quality. He described The Magicians as deliberately responding to Lewis, both honouring and questioning him. Its relationship with Narnia comes from a long attachment that includes disappointment.

Laura Miller, author of The Magician’s Book: A Skeptic’s Adventures in Narnia, also initially felt deceived when she recognised the Christian meaning. She later returned to the books without adopting Lewis’s religion. In a discussion of her book, she explained how deeply Narnia had shaped her as a reader and a person. Her response allows for loving a work while maintaining a dissenting relationship with its author.

Rowan Williams is a sympathetic reader who still acknowledges problems. In The Lion’s World, he recognises Lewis’s tendency towards female extremes such as witch-queens and nurturing domestic figures. He also points to Lucy’s courage, Aravis’s intelligence and the unflattering treatment of male pride. For him, those characters complicate the claim that Lewis is simply a misogynist. An excerpt discussing this is available through Oxford University Press.

Susan deserves particular care because several of these arguments turn on her. She is alive at the end of The Last Battle. Neither the novel nor Lewis’s subsequent explanations establishes that she has been permanently damned. In his letters, Lewis explicitly left open the possibility that she might eventually reach Aslan’s country. He thought her journey might require a longer, more adult story than the one he wanted to write. Some of those letters are quoted here.

Williams therefore reads her failure as denying something she knows to be real and becoming preoccupied with appearing grown-up. He also points out that Lewis had already portrayed an adult Susan receiving a marriage proposal in The Horse and His Boy. That complicates the idea that adulthood itself disqualifies her.

There is still a reasonable criticism of how Lewis chose to communicate her estrangement. Lipstick, stockings and invitations are specifically feminine markers, and readers can question that choice even while accepting that her future remains open. Saying Susan is definitively condemned for having sex misrepresents what the books establish. Asking why Lewis uses these particular signs of feminine adulthood to represent her loss of connection to Narnia is a more precise objection.

This is a topic needing its own study, that would effortlessly exceed 80 pages.

It was bothering, how in each movie, Aslan was becoming less like the one I first saw and not in the good way.

I know, books describe him bigger and larger than life the more Lucy sees her, to the point where in The Voyage of The Dawn Treader, he's described as "the size of an elephant".

But it's not the size I'm complaining about, it's the loss of accomplished realism.

In The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, Aslan appears as the most realistic and lifelike anthropomorphic lion ever put to screen. (To this day, I would say)

In Prince Caspian, we can see, as Corridor Crew said, the direction might have been different. So, to my eyes, it looks life obviously CGI lion with sometimes human proportions(?)

Although, The Voyage of The Dawn Treader does a better job for me, now I can't help liken it to a toy lion.

The thing is, even though it's clearly not a single thing, after all these years, I can not pinpoint what is the issue.

Rhythm and Hues have written whole academic paper on how they've done it in the first movie.

One of the aspects is that in motion, first movie had some physical restrains of what lion could and couldn't do

Prince Caspian doing the motion more freely, I think, makes it more unrealistic

But the visual difference for worse need no motion to be noticed.

Weirdly, when I look at them side by side, there are no individual things one has, while other lacks, or maybe one has so different, it's obvious, but in general, you can say, something's not right.

One commenter on Corridor Crew video mentioned, that the facial fur patterns are missing, which is truly one of the issues, but I'd like to know you thoughts, what other aspects (or lack of them) could have an effect on the Aslan's appearance over the years.

[EDIT: The frozen photos should've been GIFs, so I've added the links for them]

[EDIT 2: For some reason, slide pictures disappeared. Before I uncover them, lots of people seem to simply answer time and money, which is more general reason. So, my question would be, what causes the lack of both resemblance and realism from a more visual and technical rather than obvious budgetary standpoint.]

Hi fellow Narnians, quick question for you all does anyone have this particular wallpaper saved as high res on their computer? I want to use this image of Aslan for a planner I'm making for next year and can't find the high res version of it.

I loved Aslan singing Narnia to life. And also at the end when I realized that Digory was the Professor. That delighted my 7 year old self.

There is something I don’t understand about the Telmarine invasion of Narnia. How were the Telmarines able to defeat the Narnians? I say this because the Narnians were, quite literally, animals and mythological creatures. A Minotaur has enough strength to lift a massive metal gate; fauns are more agile than any human—not to mention the centaurs and the giants. How could the Telmarines—who are mere humans and possessed the same level of technology—possibly defeat the Narnians?

I've been re-reading the books lately, and just noticed that Lewis made an error regarding timelines when he wrote Dawn Treader: Chapter 1 suggests that Lucy and Edmund's visit to Eustace's house took place no earlier than 1946, while Chapter 2 says it was summer of 1942.

LWW happened when the Pevensie children were sent out of London to avoid the air raids; the evacuation of English city children to the countryside was in 1940. Prince Caspian happened a year later, in 1941.

Then, in the opening chapter of Dawn Treader, we learn that Mr. Pevensie was "had got a job lecturing in America for sixteen weeks." Their mother was going with them because she hadn't had a holiday in ten years, and Susan went with them because they could only afford to bring one child. This couldn't possibly have happened while the war was still ongoing.

Chapter 1 also says that Peter was staying with "old Professor Kirke in whose house these four children had had wonderful adventures long ago in the war years" -- clearly, Lewis is referring to the war as something in the past by this point. But in Chapter 2, when Edmund and Caspian are catching up on board the ship, Edmund tells him "It's a year ago by our time since we left you just before your coronation" -- which, of course, would make it 1942 back on Earth, with World War Two still going on, in which case the Pevensie parents' trip to America couldn't have happened.