Hard Light Productions Forums
Off-Topic Discussion => General Discussion => Topic started by: Carl on May 08, 2005, 10:10:51 pm
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http://mp.aol.com/video.index.adp?pmmsid=1337954&_AOLFORM=w708.h344.p7.R1
:) :) :) :)
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If it's the one about WETA, it's on apple.com as well. (AOL required some sort of plug-in that I woudn't touch. :p) I'm extremely excited about this movie; I've loved the Narnia series since reading it in second grade, and it's still one of my favorites. :D If WETA is behind the special effects, we know it'll look amazing. I only hope the movie version will be as good as that of Lord of the Rings was.
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http://narniafans.com/?id=249
there's the file w/o having to download a plugin
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That is without a doubt the most amazing thing I've seen in a long time. Unbelievable. That's it. That's Narnia. They nailed it. If the whole movie is as good as that trailer...damn, I can't wait until this December. :D
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What is Narnia?
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I must say I was hoping against hope that they would somehow not use a CG Aslan. Looks like they did a good job, but the jury's still out IMO on him.
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DLing now...
Edit: Interesting. Dune meets World of Warcraft meets Lord of the Rings. ;)
Somehow I always pictured it differently...although maybe because I've seen an older video version.
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So Narnia is about a bunch of kids who go through a door and end up in a fantasy world?
Like in the old Dungeons & Dragons cartoon?
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More or less.
There's a lot more depth to it than that tho.
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there has to be. there's something like 12 books in the series. the 2nd one is mostly background info.
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There's a hell of a lot more to it than that, actually. :p There are actually seven books in the set: The Magician's Nephew; The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe; A Horse and his Boy; Prince Caspian; The Voyage of the Dawn Treader; The Silver Chair; and The Last Battle. The order I listed isn't the order in which they were written (The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe came first, in fact), but they follow the chronological order of the story and are the order in which C.S. Lewis said that he intended them to be read. I really do feel sorry for those who have never heard of Narnia; you missed out on something truly spectacular.
To make a brief summary, Narnia is another world, one of many like our own world was. It is a world of talking, intelligent animals, and many creatures out of mythology, such as giants, centaurs, fauns, and merpeople. Narnia was created by Aslan, the great golden lion who is the sun of the Emperor-Over-the-Sea. For the most part, the seven books tell the stories of children from our world who, through various ways, find their way to Narnia. In The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, four brothers and sisters named Peter, Susan, Edmund, and Lucy come to stay at the house of Professor Kirke, an eccentric old man, to avoid the London Blitz. While in the house, Lucy, the youngest, discovers a wardrobe during a game of hide-and-seek. Going into it, she discovers not a simple rack full of coats, but the doorway to an entirely new world. That's about as much as I can say without giving away any spoilers; the story is rather difficult to put into words; similar to Lord of the Rings, it's something you truly have to read to understand.
The Chronicles of Narnia may seem like a simple children's fantasy story on the exterior, and indeed, that's all I ever saw them as at the young age when I first read them. However, as I mentioned above, they are so much more than that. C.S. Lewis is a famed Christian apologist; his work Mere Christianity is rather well known. Anyway, the Chronicles of Narnia, in their entirety, are really a beautiful allegory of Christianity; the symbolism is present on many different levels. I won't go into it too much here, since I'll leave it to those who decide to read the books to discover for themselves. The overall theme of the story is really about the idea that evil can never really triumph, that good will win out in the end. The ending of the last book, The Last Battle, was so genuinely good that it almost brings tears to my eyes. As you can tell, I hold a deep love for these stories; they had a large impact on my childhood and really inspired my ongoing love of the genre of fantasy.
As an aside, for anyone who has read the Narnia series, I'd also recommend C.S. Lewis's Space Trilogy, consisting of Out of the Silent Planet, Perelandra, and That Hideous Strength. Once again, these books contain Christian themes, but they are definitely adult works, and I consider them to be quite good.
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similar to Lord of the Rings, it's something you truly have to read to understand.
On a warm September night in 1931, three men went for an after-dinner walk on the grounds of Magdalen College, part of Oxford University. They took a stroll on Addison's Walk, a beautiful tree-shaded path along the River Cherwell, and got into an argument that lasted into the wee hours of the morning -- and left a lasting mark on world literature.
At the time, only one of the men had any kind of reputation: Henry Victor Dyson, a bon vivant scholar who had shared tables and bandied words with the likes of T.E. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Bertrand Russell. His two companions were little-known Oxford academics with a shared taste for Icelandic sagas, Anglo-Saxon verse and the austere cultural mystique of "the North." Few people remember Dyson now, while millions celebrate the names of his companions: C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien.
Yet the works that made their reputations -- "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings" for Tolkien, "The Chronicles of Narnia" for Lewis -- were profoundly shaped by that night-long argument and the bond it cemented. It's possible that Tolkien's Middle-earth would have remained entirely a private obsession, and quite likely that Lewis would never have found the gateway to Narnia.
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you forget Dyson sphere... LOL (hey it counts!)
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different guy.
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It would if it was the right Dyson. That was named after Freeman Dyson, a physicist, not Henry Victor Dyson.
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Originally posted by Mongoose
A Horse and his Boy
;7 :lol:
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Originally posted by Mongoose
The ending of the last book, The Last Battle, was so genuinely good that it almost brings tears to my eyes.
Meh, 'The Last Battle' seemed to me even as a little kid reading it, as rather... well racist when you look at its allegory... Sure he tries to mention how the bad guys are misguided but it doesn't quite work, unlike the humans working for Sauron in LotR.
The Magician's Nephew and Voyage of the Dawn Trader I've always thought of as the best two. Fun fantasy adventure without being too preachy.
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I loved The Horse and His Boy and The Voyage of the Dawn Treader. Then came The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and then all the rest...
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To tell the truth, I only read The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, and I believe Voyage of the Dawn-Treader.
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*Remembers he didn't like Voyage of the Dawn Treader*
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The last book was racist? How so? I don't believe that Lewis was making any reference to the Calormenes as a whole as being bloodthirsty or evil. In fact, their captain in that book didn't seem to have any faith in Tash at all; he was just in it for the military and financial gains. The soldier with the truest faith was the one who made it through in the end. I don't think the comparison with Lord of the Rings really holds; not only did Lewis and Tolkien have completely different motives, and indeed audiences, for writing their works as a whole (Tolkien despised allegory, for instance :p), those specific scenes seem to be created for different purposes. Lord of the Rings is far more on an epic scale; Tolkien fought in World War I himself, and I think in the case of the Southrons, he was trying to convey the idea that the soldiers who fight in wars don't necessarily know or care much about the objectives of their masters, and their own ideas may often be deluded or twisted from the truth. In the case of Lewis, keeping in line with his whole idea of faith, I think he was trying to convey that those who intentionally commit evil acts in the name of a higher power earn evil in return, while those who live their lives in a good and noble fashion receive their reward at the end. I always thought that Aslan's line to the good Calormene soldier, in which he says, "Whenever you did good acts in the name of Tash, you were actually doing them for me; whenever someone commits evil in my name, they are really doing so for Tash," was a very unique concept; it helped to tie a lot of that last book together.
For me, what made that book so special is that I think it is the greatest suggestion of what heaven could be like that I have ever read. A place where you meet all of the good people you've ever known, all of the great figures of the past. A place like this world, but so much more real and true that it's almost impossible to imagine. That image has remained with me for 11 years; I think it's truly a wonderful way to end the story.
I greatly enjoyed Voyage of the Dawn Treader myself; the idea of going out and exploring to the ends of the Earth, and finding all kinds of fantastic things along the way, appealed to me as a child, and in a very real sense, it still does for me now.
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Personally, I think 'the Last Battle' was my favourite although it got rather depressing at times, what with all the deaths (which, I know, were necessary). I think one of the great things about the Narnia Chronicles is that they work on so many different levels, as children's fantasy, Christian allegory, moral parables, so on and so forth. Also, Lord of the Rings was quite difficult for me to read when I was, like, 10; but Narnia works for pretty much all age groups.
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Sweeeeeeet... downloading now. Yeah, sorry Coolmon, the Dawn Treader was my favourite. :) It's a great fictional world - I found it really drew me in.
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Narnia... Disney... Talking Lions...
*Shoots self in head*
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All English geezers in the 30's were racist, sexist, and whatever - it's just how things WERE back then, there's no point in trying to read to much into it...:rolleyes:
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I remember reading up to somewhere in the middle of the 3rd/4th book, I found it boring, then again I was like....6, maybe 7 I should see if I can dig it up again...
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Wow... doesn't look as cinematically epic as LOTR but it destroys the BBC version. Can't wait till December.
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Originally posted by Omniscaper
Wow... doesn't look as cinematically epic as LOTR...
No, but then again it never was. LOTR is about peoples, Narnia is about people.
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Whoa, the trailer does look good... I'll see it.
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GIVE ME MY TURKISH DELIGHT, YOU OLD HAG!!!!11111111onetyone
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:lol:
(By the way, what exactly is Turkish Delight, anyway? :p)
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http://www.christmas-joy.com/recipes/turkishdelight.htm
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Just had a LOTR:EE marathon - LCD projector, Logitech Z-680's, the whole 9 yards - all day yesterday, and since it was in honor of someone's birthday, people were coming in and out the whole time. In-between showings we screened the Narnia trailer. Ended up watching the whole thing about 5 or 6 times. I think people were more excited about that than about LOTR. :p
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Wow...wish I was there :)
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I watched a bit of Master & Commander on a £22,000 Vidikron projector yesterday - nice picture...:yes:
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Yeah, I hope they don't make us wait half a year for this to come out in Australia. It's Disney though, so it shouldn't take too long... unlike some of the international films that came out last year.