Butler nails "Narnia"

What a treat to encounter Butler Shaffer's latest article at LRC, Myths, Fables, Fairy Tales, and the Real World.
I'm not a big movie-goer, but I'd recently seen The Chronicles of Narnia in the theatre and found it disappointing. It seems to be a movie intended for children, rather than a movie for "children of all ages" -- including sappy adults like me who tend to prefer thoughtful content to "adult content," which usually means stuff thoughtful parents tend to avoid especially when taking the kids out to the theatre. I enjoy good movies, but I dislike being "entertained" -- where does this seemingly constant emphasis on adult VS children's entertainment come from? -- what happened to comedy and drama, or good old story-telling not because the audience requires entertainment but because the story needs telling?

Schools seem increasingly absent the "fun" factor that might make learning enjoyable, while entertainment seems to lack the "educational" element that might profit consumers as well as producers. I find Butler's observation interesting:

This is a principal reason that the entertainment industry seems to thrive during the decline of civilizations: individuals become content with moral, intellectual, and existential passivity, preferring to live their lives through projected extensions of themselves with whom they identify.

Well, sure ... civilizations ascend and decline on an individual basis, and therein lies the success and the failure of collectivism. An enterprise that fails to the extent that it succeeds, the moral of that story perhaps?

I don't want to spoil any endings, but IMO Butler nails the flaws in Narnia with his concluding paragraph. But what do I know ... I'm an adult, and everyone seems so intent on saving the children these days that perhaps adults deserve consideration as an endangered species.