Lion's share ... A scene from the new Narnia movie
Polly Toynbee ruffled plenty of feathers earlier this week when she denounced CS Lewis's much-loved The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the film version of which was released in the UK yesterday.
It's fair to say that the Toynbee household won't exactly, er, be trooping out to see it this Christmas. Although the adaptation does well to catch the spirit of the book, Polly argues, it is so partly because both are so overtly, shamelessly Christian. "By the end, [the film] feels profoundly manipulative, as Disney usually does," writes. "But then, that is also deeply faithful to the book's own arm-twisting emotional call to believers." Youch.
So, in advance of our very own Xan Brooks's ultimate list of 50 family films (check out the Guardian Family supplement tomorrow) we took Polly at her word. What if parents don't wish to, as Lewis himself put it, "make it easier for children to accept Christianity when they [meet] it later in life"? What should kids see instead? She writes:
After much agonising - there are so many to choose from - here are my five favourite children's films, in no particular order:
- The Sound of Music - The Railway Children - Chicken Run - Bugsy Malone - The Muppet Movie
I could have chosen another ten. But there are no Disney movies here: although many have best moments, virtually all are imbued with cloying, toe-curling manipulative sentimentality, plus yukky flirtatious females fluttering their eye-lashes, so I rule them out.
There is no Tolkien here, no feudal fantasies of dark people conquered by light people, no pseudo-spiritual myths. Nor have I included any of that hectoring, moralising strain that recurs time and again in children's movies where little people/cubs find the true meaning of life and goodness in the self-discovering course of their travels and travails.
So there you go. An entirely lion-light, sacrifice-free list. Any top films to add? Or will you be rejecting Polly's advice and heading straight out for a sprinkling of Narnian magic instead?
