The winter holidays serves as the perfect backdrop to witness Disney's production of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Mustard and I treated his parents and sister on the eve of Christmas Day.

Apparently, there are biblical interpretations to The Chronicles of Narnia. Something along the lines of the Lion representing Christ and other parallels. I cannot make any biblical judgement for lack proper Bible schooling. The Chronicles follows in the box office blowout of The Passion of Christ. It seems that Christian/religious viewers are more profitable than catering to the 'other' gender - chicks (shaking head).

The movie length is about 2 hour 15 min, which is easily manageable in terms of pre-movie fluid consumption. I do forewarn that gobbling up a watermelon or two is not a good idea prior to any movie watching... see King Kong review.

Like KK, if you have a hankering for special effects and fantasy realms, you will mostly like have a positive experience with Narnia. There is a climatic battle and sufficient production suspense and character development to give this movie a solid B (or B- or B+) review.

The story follows the novels fairly accurately... line by line in many cases. I recall reading a short section from the first Narnia novel in the fourth grade, titled Lucy and the Wardrobe. The conversation between Lucy and the faun and how they reacted after accidentally running into each other were exactly portrayed in the film... down to the tear drops running down ____'s cheeks.

The children were superbly cast and more tailor made to be in this movie than the Harry Potter actors for that series. Especially endearing was Lucy, who has been played in the past by older, frumpier actresses. The 2005 Lucy was talently portrayed by Georgie Henley, age 9. The fine casting was rounded out by the icy villain, Jadis, the White Witch, played by Tilda Swinton, and Liam Neeson vocalizing Arslan, the Lion.

The Narnia production also has that very English flavour that goes amiss in many box office hits, and even in certain Potter scenes. Mustard and I are always very annoyed when British backdrops and characters become Americanized, like the recent Constantine and War of the World films. The Narnia British accent was excellently timed to the bombing of England during WW2.

To ponder further... Potter's accent portrayals were often smoothed over to leave us with an intentional unknown time table. I found this vagueness to be conceited and smothering in it's generalization (for the sake of appeal to the average English understanding viewer... kids whose older sibs are skateboarders and surfers). The richness of the British tongue lost it's voice to become more common sounding.

Recommended: Yes