British author comes out against 'Narnia'

LONDON, Oct. 16 (UPI) -- British fantasy author Philip Pullman says Disney's latest film based on C.S. Lewis' "The Chronicles of Narnia" is bad for children.

Pullman, an avowed atheist, slammed Lewis' stories as racist and religious propaganda devoid of love, Britain's The Observer reported Sunday.

Disney has rolled out the biggest marketing campaign in recent cinematic history for its Christmas film "The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe," and HarperCollins is set to publish 170 Lewis-related books in more than 60 countries, the Observer said.

Many of the seven books in Lewis' series carry a Christian theme and Disney has hired Christian marketing groups to handle the upcoming film.

"If the Disney Corp. wants to market this film as a great Christian story, they'll just have to tell lies about it," Pullman told The Observer.

Pullman said the Narnia books are absent of love.

"It's not the presence of Christian doctrine I object to so much as the absence of Christian virtue," he said. "The highest virtue, we have on the authority of the New Testament itself, is love, and yet you find not a trace of that in the books."