Q: Isn't the story of Narnia really a Christian allegory? How is the film going to handle all of that stuff? Cut it all out, or leave it in and play it up too much?
A: The Chronicles of Narnia are not exactly an allegory, at least in the strictest sense of the word.
Warning: Story Spoilers Follow Below.
Aslan's story in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a mirror of the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ as told in the New Testament of the Christian Bible. And there are many parallels to Christian themes throughout the entire Narnia series. However, the Chronicles as a whole are not strictly a direct allegory of the entire Christian Bible. Lewis himself considered it more of a "suppositional," and readers tend to take whatever messages they want from books.
From a letter C. S. Lewis wrote, to some Maryland fifth graders in 1954, on the subject:
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"I did not say to myself 'Let us represent Jesus as He really is in our world by a Lion in Narnia'; I said, 'Let us suppose that there were a land like Narnia and that the Son of God, as he became a Man in our world, became a Lion there, and then imagine what would happen.'"
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(
http://www.rapidnet.com/~jbeard/bdm/...s/cs-lewis.htm)
Here is another quote from Lewis on the subject of Narnia as allegory from an essay he wrote entitled Of Other Worlds:
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"Some people seem to think that I began by asking myself how I could say something about Christianity to children; then fixed on the fairy tale as an instrument, then collected information about child psychology and decided what age group I'd write for; then drew up a list of basic Christian truths and hammered out "allegories" to embody them. This is all pure moonshine. I couldn't write in that way. It all began with images; a faun carrying an umbrella, a queen on a sledge, a magnificent lion."
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(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronicles_of_Narnia)
And this is what the director of the film, Andrew Adamson, has to say about the Christian symbolism in the story at the San Diego Comic-Con event in July 2005:
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During the Q 'n' A, Adamson answered the question on many people's minds about whether the religious aspects of Lewis' books will be prevalent in the film version. "These days, people either read it with the spiritual meaning that C.S. Lewis intended or they read it as a great adventure story," he said. "What I was really doing was making a movie that was true to C.S. Lewis' book, so if you found spiritual meaning in that, you'll find the same in the movie; if you enjoyed it as an adventure story, you'll enjoy the movie as an adventure story."
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(
http://www.comingsoon.net/news/comic...s.php?id=10434)
So you can appreciate LWW without knowing the parallels in it, but those symbols and double meanings are there.