When I was a school headmaster, I taught one Chronicles of Narnia novel each year to every grade from kindergarten through fifth, a scheduling trick that let me know every child in the school. I read them in the order C.S. Lewis published them, not the chronological order Netflix has chosen. A 5-year-old should meet Aslan the way the Pevensies do, as a rumor in a frozen country, years before he’s ready to watch that lion sing a world into being.
Fifth graders got The Magician’s Nephew. They were old enough to perceive Genesis beneath its creation story and young enough to gasp when the tree Digory grew from a Narnian apple blows down, and its timber becomes a wardrobe. I’ll never forget the face of a boy in the back row as the significance dawned on him. It was the same look I’d seen on the kindergarteners when Aslan rose from the Stone Table.
In the Republic, Socrates says that “the beginning is the most important part of any work, especially in the case of a young and tender thing.” Greta Gerwig has chosen the wrong beginning twice over: the wrong book to start a child with and the wrong face for the lion. Her Magician’s Nephew, which she calls a rock opera, will introduce Aslan to millions of children. On Empire Magazine’s new cover, that Aslan has one blue eye and one amber, rainbow whiskers, dragon-scaled skin, and a red-striped face modeled on David Bowie. A woman, Meryl Streep, will supply the voice.
Much of the right reacted the way you’d expect, and some of it the way you’d hope. But Tim Rice went to The Daily Wire to tell conservatives to calm down. Aslan isn’t Jesus, his headline said. He’s a lion.
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