some movie-type pondering

[fox]

I picked up the DVDs of the first two Narnia movies this weekend, and have been running them in the background in the evenings when I can't face Keith Olbermann or whatever else is on. :-) I like them both very much, and the kids actually please me more and more the more I watch them, but oddly enough last night was the first time it occurred to me that in the first movie, where it's really all about the kids and the animals, how on earth is it that the beavers (and everyone else) weren't horrified that these four children, who had come to save them and their world, had come to save them and their world wearing fur coats? I mean to say! A hundred years of wintry oppression is bad enough, and then you pin all your hopes to a quartet draped in the pelts of your brethren?

I don't mean that Lewis was wrong not to include an animal-rights B-plot -- who could have expected that in the time he was writing it, anyway? -- but it's a little strange, now, that not one of the animals anywhere is even remotely uncomfortable. Isn't it?

Comments

[dira]

Well, as long as they're not the furs of talking animals... I don't know how you distinguish, at the coat stage, but I do remember a bit in the books that distinguished between perfectly-okay-to-kill non-talking animals and must-be-treated-like-people talking animals. Though of course that's easy to lose track of in the movie.

[liviapenn]

Yeah, if you think about it, there *must* be some way to tell from a distance/just by looking, because otherwise the carnivores would all starve.

Fox: "Excuse me, are you a Talking Beast or--"
Non-Talking Rabbit: *runs away*
Fox: DAMMIT.

I suppose you could just go by if they're wearing clothes or not, but then there might be tragic skinny-dipping incidents and so on.

[neotoma]

They weren't wearing fur from Talking Beasts, which is the important thing. Narnians distinguish between Talking Beasts and non-talking beasts, and it's perfectly all right to hunt and eat non-talking beasts.