Re: Reepicheep and Jacques, it just screams influence to me, both Reepicheep in PC (valiant warrior) and as he is in VDT (he's got a quest! and a Destiny!)--both of those things are pretty prominent in the characters of Matthias and Martin the Warrior, I think, and really the world of Redwall reads to me (with the caveat again that it's been eons since I read those books too) as if Jacques just decided to write Narnia with all Talking Animals and no magic. Which makes things a good deal simpler in some ways.
I'd have to reread HP to really develop this idea, I think, and probably Tolkien too, but there are at least a few explicit Tolkien references in HP, the most obvious being the Wormtail/Wormtongue thing, and I also think in some ways they're doing similar things--you know how Tolkien was perpetually toying with the idea that Ennorath/Middle-earth was the distant history of our world, and that's part of why some things in MIddle-earth are the way they are, like Fourth Age Gondor celebrating the new year on 25 March? It reminds me of things like the money in the wizarding world being the same as pre-decimalization British Muggle money, and I think on some level Rowling's books offer a view of the world in which it's possible to see magic in the background, the same way that Tolkien's books (and Allison Croggon's too, actually) offer an ancient past in the background.
After rereading PC I'm even more on board with the changes the movie made, for all the reasons you mention. And I like a lot of things in the VDT movie much better than the book, too, particularly at the ending. Maybe it's just a difference in storytelling style between then and now (well, it's definitely that, at least in part), but I feel like the Narnia movies are making a lot of similar changes that Peter Jackson and company did to LotR--though I think a lot of the Jackson changes are just bringing up bits of the backstory that are stated canonically elsewhere and suturing them into the alpha narrative, whereas the Narnia movies are taking more things on extrapolation.
Anyway. Narnia. My heart hurts for all of them (and this is what I like about bedlamsbard's fic, she is very much on board with the cruelty of it all).
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regna
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Date: 2011-01-24 22:38 (UTC)I'd have to reread HP to really develop this idea, I think, and probably Tolkien too, but there are at least a few explicit Tolkien references in HP, the most obvious being the Wormtail/Wormtongue thing, and I also think in some ways they're doing similar things--you know how Tolkien was perpetually toying with the idea that Ennorath/Middle-earth was the distant history of our world, and that's part of why some things in MIddle-earth are the way they are, like Fourth Age Gondor celebrating the new year on 25 March? It reminds me of things like the money in the wizarding world being the same as pre-decimalization British Muggle money, and I think on some level Rowling's books offer a view of the world in which it's possible to see magic in the background, the same way that Tolkien's books (and Allison Croggon's too, actually) offer an ancient past in the background.
After rereading PC I'm even more on board with the changes the movie made, for all the reasons you mention. And I like a lot of things in the VDT movie much better than the book, too, particularly at the ending. Maybe it's just a difference in storytelling style between then and now (well, it's definitely that, at least in part), but I feel like the Narnia movies are making a lot of similar changes that Peter Jackson and company did to LotR--though I think a lot of the Jackson changes are just bringing up bits of the backstory that are stated canonically elsewhere and suturing them into the alpha narrative, whereas the Narnia movies are taking more things on extrapolation.
Anyway. Narnia. My heart hurts for all of them (and this is what I like about bedlamsbard's fic, she is very much on board with the cruelty of it all).