chained books, somewhere in Narnia

Michael Apted’s film adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s third Narnia chronicle The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, on general release in the UK since last week, stars the kind of elaborate material texts that are becoming commonplace in new fantasy films. Those who remember the BBC’s version of the Chronicles of Narnia from the early 1990s probably recall the hand-drawn map in the opening sequence of each episode, over which, accompanied by haunting horn music, the viewer was drawn into the mysterious lands of Lewis’s imagination. Like others of its genre, this new film takes delight in the dramatic and cinematic possibilities of maps, diaries, and books that can be transformed through computer technology. When Lucy finds a book of incantations in a library in the invisible mansion, for example, the film indulges in a not strictly necessary scene of CGI magic emanating from this generically ‘old’ (probably folio) volume resting on a quasi-ecclesiastical lectern. Lucy and the others are then shown a map of the islands they must find, which when unrolled before them becomes distinctly ipad-like with its touchscreen Google Earth capabilities. It’s interesting how, as computer and film technologies become more sophisticated, they don’t move away from but seem to return increasingly to the iconic and dramatic potential of more traditional material texts, even as they transform them.