The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005)

Brief: Lucy (Georgie Henley) is the first to find the secret of the wardrobe in the professor's (Jim Broadbent) mysterious old house. At first, no one believes her when she tells of her adventures in the land of Narnia. But soon Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and then Peter (William Moseley) and Susan (Anna Popplewell) discover the Magic and meet Aslan (v. Liam Neeson), the Great Lion, for themselves. In the blink of an eye, their lives are changed forever.

I copied that from the back of my copy of the book. Works for me.

I must tell you that I was relieved when I discovered that the film had been shot in chronological order. Explains a lot, doesn't it? At first it seems that director/co-writer Andrew Adamson has quite the bunch of woefully undertalented kids on his hands, but they, to a certain extent, grow on you as the film marches on. I still think that their characters are reduced to their roughest definitions, no nuance included.

Of course, the greatest challenge facing Adamson and co-writers Ann Peacock, Christopher Markus, and Stephen McFeely must have been how to stretch C.S. Lewis' masterwork into a feature length film. It's a beautiful, wonderful story, to be sure, but it's also on the short side. Lewis, bless his heart, got kids: he knew what to describe and what to leave up to the imagination. In one interview I read, Adamson said he surprised himself by how much of the novel existed only in his imagination. Quite the task, then, combining the imaginations of generations into something they could all connect with and recognize.

The CGI work is stellar, Tilda Swinton is convincingly evil as Queen Jadis/the White Witch, but my heart firmly belongs in the camps of the Beavers (Ray Winstone and Dawn French) and Mr. Tumnus (James McAvoy). Mostly the Beavers as the Pevensies' temporary parents, though.

I must confess, despite being keenly aware of the live actors' shortcomings, I felt intensely emotionally attached to this picture. Any time anything, anything positive at all happened, I found myself welling up with tears. It's hard to be cruel to something so engaging. A-

P.S. Seriously, Madison, that guy?