Director of children's fantasies and sometimes actor.
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe (1988) -- Produced by the BBC as part of a four-part Wonderworks miniseries, which allows the story to take its time for a total of three hours. Although it has the BBC special effects you would expect, this adds to rather than takes away from its charm, doing a nice "impressionistic" job, allowing the story itself to engage you rather than the mind-blowing effects that are so common they no longer blow the mind. Stage-style costumes and settings, small people in animal suits, 2-D animations flying around the screen, and simple video tricks end up being rather graceful in their presentations. The actors, especially the children, are superb and pre-date the smart kind of child actors and acting that would appear in the Harry Potter movies. The story is very literally translated from C.S. Lewis's book, almost scene for scene and word for word, and the movie should be acceptable to fans of the book and anyone else who isn't completely reliant upon "realistic" (cause what does that mean in this fantasy world anyway?) talking animals, etc. (See Alex Kirby for the sequel, The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and the Voyage of the Dawn Treader.) A
Copyright (c) Sep 2005 by Rusty Likes Movies