Unlike you, I do think the Narnia films directly borrow their logic of representation from that established in the LOTR films; WETA’s involvement suggests that the underlying FX pipeline, from design and previz to final rendering and editing, is being used pretty much unchanged. This makes perfect industrial sense — once you’ve built an assembly line, why make an entirely new one rather than simply plugging new widgets into the old line? But I agree that it’s a detriment to a fictional world that requires a different kind of vision. And your reference to the range of stylization displayed in videogames is dead on.

As for Speed Racer — I wanted to like it; I’m one of the few who enjoyed all three parts of the Matrix trilogy (albeit for different reasons). But I found it maddeningly slow and clumsy, despite — or maybe because of — the insane visual pyrotechnics being thrown onscreen. The film’s most interesting and problematic tic for me was not the much-commented-on and admittedly spectacular race sequences, but the overuse of pans and wipes (Racer X’s head moves across screen right, revealing another scene with people talking, who then rotate screen left, revealing Racer X in closeup again). This came across as an attempt at a new kind of cinematographic grammar, a way of eliminating hard cuts and keeping the visual action and storytelling “continuous” (a longtime obsession of the Wachowskis’, dating back to bullet time in the first Matrix). But it reminded me most strongly of Ang Lee’s misbegotten Hulk, which foregrounded one order of screen illusion (the big green giant) while working more radically (if subtly) in another, those tricky scene transitions patterned on comic book panels. In both cases, arguably films ahead of their time; but in both cases, unsuccessful *as films*, no matter how successful as technology tests.

—

Horse and His Boy is clearly a side tale.
Magician’s Nephew, despite its “origin story”, reads largely as the same.
Last Battle is, well, what it is. If the first four books are made into movies, I’m not sure they’re going to make the L.B. even if all four have been commercial successes.

This puts it very well, Tim. I haven’t seen Prince Caspian yet, and I’m sure I will eventually–I am a fantasy geek, after all–but I don’t expect that anything the film does for me will differ from what The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe did for me: it entertained, but did not impress. And I think the greatest of the several reasons why that it didn’t was simply the look of it, and the tone set by that look. The Narnia books are fundamentally a kind of pastoral (all the better for their heavily allegorical and, as you say, “fairy-tale”-style plots), and a visually epic style just runs counter to that.

Incidentally, which do you consider to be the four “core” Narnia books? I assume you’re leaving out The Horse and His Boy, but which others?