Suzi: This last book of The Chronicles of Narnia is the only volume of the seven that wasn’t a well worn copy in my library, as beloved books can be. Quite possibly the only reason I sought out The Last Battle for another dive was to read it (only one time) to my daughter many years ago, because it breaks my heart all over again. Eko’s bringing it to his writing, along with the desecration (yes, I mean it) of the story by Netflix and the Lewis Estate…well, it stirs me is all I can say.
Netflix is putting Narnia in a new skin, and C.S. Lewis wrote the test for spotting one 70 years ago.
September 18, 2026, ekolovesyou.com
https://tinyurl.com/mpa8597w
In the last days of Narnia, an ape named Shift talked a donkey named Puzzle into pulling a dead lion’s skin out of a pool and wearing it.
Puzzle did all the work. He carried the water and hauled the loads and said, “Of course, Shift, of course.” When something yellow came over the waterfall into Caldron Pool, Puzzle was the one who went in after it. The water nearly killed him. He came out half-drowned and bruised, dragging a lion’s skin the size of a hearthrug, and he stood there dripping and shivering while Shift walked around the thing and patted it and smelled it. A wicked gleam came into the ape’s eye.
“It is a lion’s skin.”
Puzzle wanted to bury it.
Lions are solemn, he said, “because of You Know Who.”
Shift called it a winter coat. He sent the donkey downriver to a market that had no oranges, and while Puzzle was gone, he got out a needle and thick thread, and a big pair of scissors.
He cut the body short. He sewed a long collar for a long neck. He put ties under the belly. Every now and then, a bird passed overhead, and he stopped his work and watched it, because he did not want anyone to see what he was doing.
Lewis published that scene 70 years ago in 1956. Yesterday it was back in the news. The director of the new Narnia picture told Empire what Netflix is doing with the old books.
The Magician’s Nephew moves the story from the London of 1900 into 1950s Britain. The look is glam rock. “I wanted a rock opera,” Greta Gerwig said. “I wanted it to be big and transporting.”
The first pictures show Aslan with a red-striped face and multicolored eyes, a look she credits to David Bowie, and the lion speaks in Meryl Streep’s voice. Lewis’s own estate is producing. The film opens next February.
Every generation puts a new skin on the old stories.
That is normal work, to revivify timeless myths for the current times. It used to be mostly harmless, but for the past few decades, the new skin keeps the old face and sews in a new mouth. The story you were raised on comes back wearing its own face. The whole shelf is up for re-skinning.
Lewis saw it coming a century ago, and what he left us was a test.
“A good deal of Puzzle’s grey nose and face could be seen through the open mouth of the lion’s head. No one who had ever seen a real lion would have been taken in for a moment. But if someone who had never seen a lion looked at Puzzle in his lionskin, he just might mistake him for a lion, if he didn’t come too close, and if the light was not too good, and if Puzzle didn’t let out a bray and didn’t make any noise with his hoofs.”
—C.S. Lewis, The Last Battle
A costume only works on somebody who has never seen the real thing.
Read Lewis’s conditions again, and they turn into a kit you can hold in your hands. A skin holds up from far away, on a screen, in a trailer. Up close, in the pages, the stitches show. Every costume looks better in the dark, so hold the new version next to the old book in daylight. The disguise dies the moment the creature opens its mouth. Lewis’s lion sings a world into being.
Gerwig told Christian film critic Ted Baehr a year and a half ago that she loved the old 1979 cartoon, and now she has swapped the mouth of the one who sings the world. Wait and hear what the new one sings.
Lewis even gave us the Trickster’s signature move.
When Puzzle finds his conscience and asks what will become of them if the real Aslan turns up, Shift says he never does turn up, not nowadays. At that exact moment, the sky answers with a thunderclap, and the ground trembles under them. Puzzle hears a warning. Shift, whose mind works very quickly, hears permission. He tells the donkey he was just going to say the thunder was the sign they were waiting for. The objection gets sewn into the costume.
Every single “No” from heaven gets tailored into a “Yes.”
Notice who Lewis refuses to mock. Puzzle is not the villain of the scene. He is cold and tired, and a voice he trusts keeps telling him he isn’t clever. Lewis saves his anger for the ape with the scissors, and gives the donkey mercy.
So if people we love get swept up by the trailer, they are not the enemy, and the film itself may be lovely. We’ll judge it the way Lewis taught us, up close and in good light. Nobody gets taken in because they are stupid. They get taken in because nobody ever walked them up to the real lion.
The enemy has never made anything.
He wears. He puts on light, he puts on scripture, he puts on a lion’s skin. Lewis was writing about what the war looks like when it comes for the children. That part belongs to us. The answer to a dressed-up story has always been familiarity.
Read the real book. Read it out loud to the kids in your life until the real lion’s voice lives in their ears. A child who has walked with Aslan through seven books can’t be sold a donkey in a skin, at any distance, in any light.
The film comes out in five months. The war is older than any calendar, and it has always been a fight over who speaks in the lion’s voice. This weekend, the old books are still on the shelf, and the light in our homes is still good.
♥EKO