Other Titles • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005) • The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch & the Wardrobe • The Chronicles of Narnia • more
He continues: “First, we found a wardrobe that C.S. Lewis actually owned in a museum in the States. It’s a big, oblong, square wardrobe with a carving on it, and quite dark—a Jacobean-style wardrobe. So that gave us the idea that our wardrobe shouldn’t be too Baroque or decorative. It should have a simplicity about it. Next, Andrew very cleverly came to the conclusion that this wardrobe should have one large door. It’s a portal after all, to another world. So ours has one entrance that the children find irresistible.”
Ford also took inspiration from the sixth book in The Chronicles of Narnia, The Magician’s Nephew, which reveals that the wardrobe was originally made of apple wood, and attempted to replicate that dark, rich wood. “Knowing that C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe was heavily carved, Andrew and I also wondered what authentic carvings to put on it,” Ford goes on. “So we came up with the idea of telling the story of The Magician’s Nephew in the carvings. We used nine images from the book that are carved into the panels of the wardrobe, plus the lion’s heads at the top. At the bottom, we’ve got the White Witch and her sister. So the whole of the wardrobe tells quite a nice story.”
To further transform soundstages into the winter-cursed Narnian forest, Ford secured the talents of two Kiwi movie veterans—Russell Hoffman, the head greensman who led a team of arborists and landscapers to create the forest of Narnia, and “snowman” Peter Cleveland, whose crew used 11 different materials to create the copious make-believe snow that adorns so many of the Narnian sets.
Hoffman’s indoor landscapers planted over 225 trees on the production’s soundstages to match the forests of Eastern Europe. “I’m actually a staunch environmentalist,” Hoffman notes, “so the trees that we chose were all part of experimental crops that have been used for commercial purposes. They’re not part of the New Zealand ecology or anything like that.” While Hoffman’s lumberjacks trucked the trees far and wide from around the country’s north island, Cleveland reached out to the U.K. and the U.S. for two different types of artificial snow used to create Narnia’s winter wonderland.
“We used air foam on the trees, which is the same material used in the construction industry to insulate houses,” Cleveland explains. “Another type of product we used is a paper snow which comes from chopped-up diapers. These were from Welsh diapers, and the foam product on the trees came from Tennessee. The bonus of that paper product was that we could eliminate footprints easily and return the set back to a smooth dressing for each new take.”
Another of Ford’s remarkable designs is the “beaver lodge,” where Mr. and Mrs. Beaver give the Pevensie children refuge while reciting the history of Narnia. Director Adamson envisioned the beavers as rustic craftsmen, creating their home, furniture and tools from their surroundings, and trading with the local dwarves for other commodities. He wanted a very authentic, “beaverized” look, which required the designers to unexpectedly immerse themselves in beaver biology…and architecture.
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