I did see the trailer for Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and it did depress me. From the first movie, and more strongly in the second and third, the ... producer/director/writers/whoeverall it is seem to be moving further and further away from the source material and substituting just generic fantasy adventure what-have-you. The thing about the Narnia books, all of them, is that they're intimate. With The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, it's the interiors of Mr. Tumnus's cave, the beavers' lodge, or even the courtyard of what the witch calls her "house" that we see. There's a battle, sure, but as important as the battle is the poor squirrel that gets turned to stone as the witch is slogging her way through the emerging spring, and the mice gnawing at Aslan's ropes. And yes, you picked the two best parts, in my opinion, in Prince Caspian. The pagan revival isn't intimate in the way that, say, Mr. Tumnus's cave is, but it's *personal*--the schoolgirl who tears off her shoes to follow Bacchus (am I remembering right? or was it the schoolteacher?), the town-sized (not Moria-sized) bridge over Beruna. And Voyage of the Dawn Treader is precisely about personal trials: Eustace peeling off the dragon skin, Lucy eavesdropping on her school chum, Caspian having to give up on going to the utter east. Not about, uh, the return of the White Witch and battles with what look like the Pirates of the Caribbean in the Dark Dream Island.

What you (via hans_the_bold?) have to say about Disney's The Little Mermaid is fascinating. He doesn't want her to want it --yes, precisely.