Next Stop Narnia

OK, action!" says the director. "You think you've found a good hiding place, Georgie. You're feeling for the back of the wardrobe." It's October 2004 on the set of "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" in Auckland, New Zealand. The director in question is Andrew Adamson, who made the hilarious, irreverent raspberries that were the "Shrek" movies. The actress in question is Georgie Henley, who does not have to root around for her inner child because she actually is a child: wide-eyed, luminous and 10 years old. Georgie's character, Lucy Pevensie, is playing hide-and-seek with her sister and brothers on a wet day in a stuffy manor outside London. She has ducked into an armoire full of furs. As she pushes slowly toward the back--readers of C. S. Lewis's classic fantasy series will be way ahead of us--the crunching of mothballs beneath her shoes gives way, first disconcertingly, then thrillingly, to the crunching of snow. "You feel something," Adamson tells Georgie as a camera rolls along a track beside her. "Ow! What's that? A branch? That's weird, but not as weird as... a forest ?!"

Later, in the catering tent, Georgie sits with her castmates over lunch. She comes from Yorkshire, England. At first she is too shy to talk, but, as is often the case with 10-year-olds, this is merely a prelude to talking breathlessly. She's asked what she thought of the Narnia set the first time she saw it--Narnia, of course, being a magic land locked in perpetual winter by an evil White Witch named Jadis (Tilda Swinton). The filmmakers, it seems, wanted Georgie's first reaction to Narnia preserved on film. "That was so cool," she says. "They blindfolded me. They carried me in, and it was really weird because no one was trusted to carry me down the stairs. So there was somebody at the top of the steps, somebody at the middle and somebody at the bottom. They passed me down man to man, like a package! Then they took the --blindfold off, but made me close my eyes. They turned me around and said, 'Open them'." What did she see? Georgie finds the question strange. " Narnia, " she says. "It was beautiful."

"The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" arrives on Dec. 9, part of a holiday season that looks more promising for rousing mainstream fare--"King Kong" and another "Harry Potter" are also headed our way--than for the usual highbrow movies that win Golden Globes just as most of America makes plans not to see them. Even mainstream movies can come with baggage, however, and "Narnia" has already been the subject of a strange debate online and in newspapers. Will the movie be too religious for a wide audience? Might it not be religious enough for Lewis's Christian fans?

The speculation is understandable, partly because the climax of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" can be read as an allegory for Jesus' death and resurrection--though how many of us read it that way when we were 8?--and partly because, after "The Passion of the Christ," movies are increasingly regarded as things to play tug of war with, rather than share. In any case, NEWSWEEK was given an exclusive look at a rough cut of the movie. "Narnia," a $150 million production cofinanced by Disney and the educationally minded Walden Media, is a PG-rated movie about, and for, families. A movie that features a pitched battle with children, Minotaurs, polar bears and talk-ing wolves, but no bloodshed. A movie that understands the pulse-quickening value of peril and betrayal, but prizes loyalty and forgiveness. It's faithful to the novel, and only as Christian as you want it to be.

When Adamson deviates from Lewis's work, it's generally to add rather than subtract. Unlike the volumes of J.R.R. Tolkien's overstuffed "Lord of the Rings" trilogy, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is a slim, evocative book that always seems smaller than you remember, like a house you lived in as a kid. The movie opens with a sequence just hinted at in the novel: a swarm of German bombers attack London during World War II, and Mrs. Pevensie packs her children off for the countryside to live under the benign neglect of a mysterious professor (Jim Broadbent). Soon Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy tumble through the wardrobe into Narnia, where it has long been prophesied that two daughters of Eve and two sons of Adam--let's pause to smile over the fact that the director's name is Adamson--would free Narnia from Jadis's rule and help the noble lion Aslan usher in spring, at the expense of his own death and rebirth. Aslan (voiced by Liam Neeson) is a magnificent bit of computer animation, whether or not you think he's Jesus.

Lewis's stepson Douglas Gresham, who oversees the late author's estate, is unabashedly a man of faith. But it was his belief that the "Narnia" story could speak for itself that made such an inclusive movie possible. Gresham spent decades trying to get a movie made, most recently with Paramount, which was reportedly going to set the movie in modern-day L.A. after an earthquake. "I never despaired," says Gresham. "Being a Christian, I'm fully aware that the Holy Spirit is in charge of these things." After the industry-altering success of the "Lord of the Rings" and "Harry Potter" movies, many suitors came running, but Gresham signed with Walden Media because executive Perry Moore had made a passionate plea before the gold rush. Walden hired producer Mark Johnson ("Rain Man," "The Little Princess"), as well as Adamson, a warm New Zealand-er with such long blond hair that little Georgie initially thought he was a girl. "It took 30 seconds with Andrew to know that he was the perfect guy to direct this," says Disney Studios chairman Dick Cook, whose company coproduced the film and will market and distribute it worldwide, lending it a gold-plated secular imprima-tur. "You could see in his eyes that he'd already made the movie in his head."