"Narnia": Cool effects dazzle, but heroine's warmth and wonderment captivate

Readers of C.S. Lewis' beloved fantasy novel "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" may remember its touching dedication, to the author's goddaughter Lucy. "I wrote this story for you," he writes, "but when I began it I had not realized that girls grow quicker than books. As a result you are already too old for fairy tales ... but some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again."

Appropriately, the central human figure in the book is a little girl named Lucy — and just as appropriately, the heart of Andrew Adamson's movie version of the book belongs firmly to the little girl who plays her. Georgie Henley, just 8 years old when cast, is a West Yorkshire schoolgirl making her professional acting debut. She's a beguiling, watchful child with a real-kid cuteness (her slightly crooked teeth are refreshingly non-Hollywood), and she effortlessly steals the movie from an icicle-wearing Tilda Swinton — no small feat.

Lucy is our guide for this journey through an old wardrobe into the magical land of Narnia, where lampposts bloom in the snow, shirtless fauns wear red scarves, and beavers prepare fish and chips for hungry visitors. With her three siblings, she quickly learns that Narnia loyalists fear the evil White Witch (Swinton), who has made it forever winter and never Christmas, and await the return of their true leader, the lion Aslan (voiced nobly, but with a touch of humor, by Liam Neeson). While the film is replete with elaborate scenery, lavish battle scenes and nifty CGI effects, you might just find yourself dazzled by Henley, who's clearly still young enough to believe in fairy tales. She gazes at the proceedings with happy wonderment, never doubting the magic.

And this movie version is mostly magical, though not without some missteps. Lewis' short novel gets expanded a bit for the screen by Adamson and a slew of screenwriters, and not every added touch is successful: a chase scene that goes nowhere, an escape from a frozen waterfall that feels excessive, and rather too much talk from Mr. and Mrs. Beaver, who bicker like an old vaudeville act. In general, whenever the movie wanders from Lewis' narrative, it stumbles.

But grown-up children who remember our own travels in Narnia will find that many of the details resonate beautifully: the clippety-clop of the faun Tumnus' hooves, the Beavers' cozy lair, the worn oriental rugs and endless hallways of the Professor's home, and Swinton's chillingly precise performance as the Witch, a creature so evil she turns butterflies into stone.

And the addition of a brief prologue, in which we see the horrific nighttime London bombings that drove the Pevensies (and numerous other children) to the safety of the countryside, works very well, hauntingly placing the story in its World War II context far more so than Lewis' text. (The children's thoroughly regular middle-class pedigree is also emphasized, amusingly. "We're not heroes," says Lucy's horrified sister Susan, upon hearing of what Narnia has in store for them. "We're from Finchley.") The book's well-discussed Christian allegorical content, by contrast, is rendered precisely as Lewis wrote it; no more and no less overt than on the page.

Movie versions of beloved books are always best approached with a little distance, as nothing can ever supplant the movie each of us created in our imagination while reading of Narnia on some rainy afternoon. But Adamson's "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe," helped along by Henley's shining eyes, finds a little enchantment of its own. You don't have to be a child to appreciate this movie, just old enough to enjoy fairy tales again.

Moira Macdonald: 206-464-2725 or mmacdonald@seattletimes.com