Product reviewsThe Chronicles of Narnia: the Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (DVD, 2005)

Classic Favorite Children's Literature & Movies

Our Family has loved the Narnia Series since each of Us were children.. Which joyfully has now become a movie Series.. Hopefully the Silver Chair will be released in 2019.. Amazing beloved adventures for your Family with moral values based storyline..
First printing of the Book Set was in the 1950's.. People have loved it since..
NurseCherri Read full review...

Verified purchase:  Yes | Condition: pre-owned | Sold by: whytell2008

I have really enjoyed these movies earlier.

Product is fair at best. The first DVD had problems with bright and dim scenes. This was very difficult to enjoy the movie. I was also a little upset that they came as individual movies instead of a boxed set.Read full review...

Verified purchase:  Yes | Condition: new | Sold by: cool_collectibl...

Inside the most magical wardrobe

Is there anything more exciting for a bored child than to discover a portal that opens into a magical world of fairies and fauns, where a majestic lion battles a bad witch? That's the premise of The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, Walt Disney Picture's version of the first book in Lewis' seven-volume, allusion-rich, and allegorical exploration of Christian theology.

During the London Blitz, four English children (The Pevensie children, ages 12 to 17) are evacuated to the country, into the care of an eccentric old professor. Soon, the children stumble upon a wardrobe in an unused room. Like Alice in Wonderland, the wardrobe is the portal to another world. Once they cross the threshold, they go into a magical world.

As the Pevensie kids enter Narnia, they have to face some unexpected truths. Jadis the bad-tempered, cold-hearted evil White Queen (Tilda Swinton), holds all of Narnia in her frozen grip.

Their sudden, but expected arrival triggers a call to war. And the lion king messiah Aslan returns to lead the way. Edmund Pevensie (Skandar Keenness), older brother Peter (William Moseley), sister Susan (Anna Popplewell), and, the youngest, Lucy (Georgie Henley), will have to face great challenges as they fight alongside Aslan to return Narnia to the glorious kingdom it used to be.

As fantasy films go, Narnia tells a relatively easy-to-follow story, clearly designed for a younger audience than The Lord of the Rings. The typical core family values theme of the Disney movies mixes its brand of Christian family values with popular English sentiment.

Despite comparisons to The Lord of the Rings, Narnia has more in common with both The Wizard of Oz and Peter Pan, since all three stories involve children who escape day-to-day pessimism to experience wild adventures.

High-tech special effects enable the filmmakers to breath life into exotic and beautiful creatures of myth and fantasy. Fauns with the legs of goats, half-human and half-horse centaurs, and a magnificent lion that talks and leads an army of gnomes, fairies, beavers, hawks, and foxes are some of the visual marvels this movie offers us.

Director Andrew Adamson (Shrek) makes an impressive live-action debut, getting engrossing performances from his young cast and grafting a nice world of special effects, giving The Chronicles of Narnia an impressive start as another family classic of myth and fable on the big screen.Read full review...

A very good movie

A great way to entertain yourself. Just pop "The Lion, the Witch & The Wardrobe" into your DVD player and you're set if rain forces you to stay inside. The movie is very good with image effects, but does deviate from the book at several times. For one thing, while the book says that the kids were evacuees from London during World War II, the Blitz was added on especially for the movie. The book was probably set in late-1939, which saw the biggest-ever of all the evacuations of women and children from London and other big cities in Britain. By the time the blitz was underway, evacuation was down to a trickle as most Britons were determined to tough it out together. Another area where the movie deviated from the book was that the kids hid in the closet, not because they broke a window playing ball, but to hide from the lady of the house as she was showing guests around. In this version of Narnia, Peter and Susan are portrayed as a little more immature than in the book, often given to making sarcastic comments to each other, which is typical of teenagers. They look more like 21st Century teenagers appearing in a movie that just happened to be set in 1939 or 1940.
This edition of Narnia is far more dramatic and emotionally charged than a BBC version which was released at the end of the 1980s. This version feels like a movie, not just a videotaped stage play and brings all the movie and film technology of the 21st Century to an old story.Read full review...

C.S. Lewis action adventure

It is hard to make a movie from a book that matches the images which the readers have created in their mind's eye. The difficulty is compounded when the book is widely read and beloved. Producers want a return on investment which means the script writers and the directors tend to focus on that which is cinematic rather on that which may be more of the 'essence' of the book.
Such is the case with the "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe". The book is about trust and belief, good and evil and redemption. The battle is but a climax where the choices made are proven true or false. The movie, while addressing the core issues of the book, spent too much time on the battle leaving the movie with a feel of Lord of the Rings 'lite'.
The first third of the movie where the children flee London during the blitz, their stay at the Professor's manor, the discovery of Narnia through the wardrobe and Lucy's and Edmund's interactions are very well made and true to the book. The middle section was also well made, but to much was demanded of the child actors and they don't quite pull it off. The last third of the movie, which mainly deals with the battle, swamps the rest of the movie. Here is where the producers and the studio have mots influenced the film. They seem to have decided that its the Lord of the Rings demographic for whom they are making this movie. The CGI in the rest of the film is both good and, no doubt, expensive. In order for the movie to pay for itself, and to ensure sequels, they need a block buster, and block busters are not make without huge action set pieces. A pity really, because "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" is not a huge action book. Its about a little girl who finds magic and believes in it.

Also, as a parent, I will not let my child (currently six) see this movie until he's 9 or 10. We do however read the book together and there he finds his own magic and wants to believe in it too.Read full review...

I love it

Being 49 years old, and experiencing the thrill of seeing one of your favorite childhood stories (and I have no reservations about admitting that I have reread these stories several times in my adult years) brought to life with such skill and devotion is almost impossible to describe. I took my 12 year old granddaughter to the theatre and we embarked on the adventure of a lifetime. The only other movie experience I can compare this to is the making of the LOTR trilogy. To sit spellbound and watch a story unfold in pictures in this way is nothing short of miraculous. To finally put faces to well-loved characters and have the visual aids to finally SEE the story and not just read it, really Rocks! The movie cast and crew stayed true to the storyline and feelings invoked by the novel, adding amazing color and life to a classic story. So many books have been made into movies, with changes to the storylines and other disappointments, but you definitely will not be disappointed by this seamless effort. Make sure you see it right away and buy it so that you can see it again and again.Read full review...

Excellent Film But.....,

I am an avid reader of the Chronicles of Narnia. I go through the books once a year, so I was really excited to purchase this movie. The movie is very well done, but does disappoint in a few ways as it strays from the focus on the central character--Aslan. The lion is the heart and soul of all seven books. All of the characters in the book performed their marvelous deeds because of Him--not necessarily because of any natural skills or morals they possessed. The movie did not convey this. The sets were gorgeous, but the photography could have been better. Some of the scenes were shot from angles which took away from the depth and grandeur of the filming location. Other scenes were magnificent. The charge of the animals and humans in the final battle was breath taking! The acting of all principle characters was believable--especially the little girl who played young Lucy. The screenplay, though strong, could have been deeper. Still, I recommend this movie to all. There is much to be loved and appreciated in it. I hope Disney produces film versions of all seven books. Buy this movie, you will love having it in your collection. Don't forget to support one of the fine Ebay sellers when you do.Read full review...

Excellent and entertaining!

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe,
is based upon the second book in the series of Narnia, by C.S. Lewis.
Here we follow four siblings and how they stumble there way into the magical land of Narnia. Narnia is inhabited by all sorts of mythical creatures, but is under the domination of the evil White Witch. The children soon discover that they are a part of greater legend, and as one the children gets into a heck of mess, the rest of them set of to get help from the (the real king of Narnia) Aslan.

The first film in the series of Narnia is an impressive begining! Though it is movie made for all ages, it is a movie that still appeals to the more mature audience. If of course, your expecting a new film in the Lord of the Rings series, i think you will be dissapointed... but keeping in mind that it is a Disney picture i think that it is a very good interpretation of the book, and both quite funny and entertaining movie and not to mention the really mood filling and incredible soundtrack!Read full review...

Narnia

This is a very spectacular movie with the FX, but it leaves you feeling like they rushed you through the storyline. I have read the books to my kids and also seen the English made version that is a double tape. I loved the BBC version even though the beavers are people in costume which is a little lame. I am British and grew up with C S Lewis books. I would recommend seeing the BBC version and reading the books before watching this or you won't know what you are missing. There is also a double tape of Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawntreader, books 2 and 3 AND the Silver Chair. I am sorry that most American kids will miss out on so much of the depth of the story if they JUST see this version. I wish the BBC had finished the series, but I don't know if that is going to happen with this version being so much more popular.Read full review...

Narnia Posted by CK-Auctions

CS Lewis' classic children's book The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe holds a special place in many readers' hearts, usually alongside Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. The authors, in fact, were long-time friends who (as members of a literary group called the Inklings) even critiqued each others' work. The parallel between the two books continues in the fact that the narrative power and visual appeal of both these stories beg for them to be brought to the screen... and that the very nature of the stories made this difficult to do well. That is, until computer-generated animation came of age in moviemaking. Now we can have believable fauns, centaurs, giants, and lions inhabiting a gorgeous fantasy landscape; we can (if it's done well) have a Narnia (as we had a Middle Earth) that allows us to see it, at least to some degree, the way we have imagined it.

The film does one other thing that warms my heart for its authenticity. It starts off the Narnia series as it should be: with the first book that Lewis wrote, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. In the past few years, it has become a new fad to re-order the seven Narnia books in internal chronological order rather than publication order, thus placing The Magician's Nephew, the next-to-last book, in first place. This is a really, truly dreadful thing to do, because The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is the book that introduces us to the world of Narnia, just as the four children are introduced to it. In The Magician's Nephew, many of the mysterious magical elements of Narnia are explained... but unless you've experienced the preceding five stories, you don't know why these particular elements are special and interesting. Furthermore, this ordering of the books spoils some of the events in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.

Why did we all get put into such a mess? The official word is that this is Lewis' preferred order, but in fact it is not – and as a scholar of literature who did her dissertation on the fantasy novel, including Lewis' novels, I've done the research and I know where the problem arose. Years after the books were all published, one of Lewis' young fans wrote a letter to him suggesting that it was a good idea to put the books in internal order. Lewis wrote back saying he thought that was a fine idea. (And it is – if you've already read the books and want to re-read them in a different light.) But I don't think we should consider this one offhand comment as an indication that Lewis genuinely thought it was the best order; in fact, while Lewis was alive, it stayed as just that, an option that readers could take for themselves. (My 1970 printing of the series has the spines numbered correctly!) Only in recent years has the fad for reordering them taken over, much to my dismay.

So I have to give a big thank-you to the filmmakers for proving my point, and the point of all the other devoted Narnia fans: the best way to start out experiencing Narnia is with this story, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe!

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Posted by CK-AuctionsRead full review...

The Chronicles of Narnia

This is a beautiful story of adventure and delight with the imagination of a child.
I love the colors , animation and adventures the children experience while returning to the real life and still maintaining the adventure.
They then remember the stories and people they saw, and carry that knowledge the rest of their life.
I read the book , took my grandchildren to see the movie and then couldn't wait to get the disc for home. We have watched it several times .
It is rare to find a movie that several age groups still enjoy, from my 6 year old niece to my 13 year old grandson. (not counting myself, a, grandma)
This story has a war without nonsense, it is for a reality, a save the world we live in senerio. It has a riligious undertone of beginning and sacrifice and ending and rebirth. With the bad guy, good guy, content all can see.
I highly recommend this movie for a score of people of all ages and will be a must have for your collections.
I look forward to the next Chronical movie, from the book.Read full review...

The Chronicles of Narnia : Is it worth it? Next Movie?

When my family and I watched this in the theater, it was a very different night at the movies for us.
The first hour or so of the movie tends to DRAG and go VERY SLOWLY...my 7 year old son fell asleep, and my husband nodded off a few times...
in the last 30-45 minutes of the movie, things seemed to get a bit more interesting, and my hubby and son woke up to catch the last minutes of the show.
I know that the lion the witch and the wardrobe is only ONE of the books in this series, so if they plan on making more movies from this author, i hope they put a little more action in them...paying those high price theater ticket and snack prices just WAS NOT worth it to me.
BUT>>>i grew up in a school, where this book was an assignment, and loved the book....my son and hubby had never read it...is that why i stayed awake? maybe..the storyline is good..but Dragged out too much.Read full review...