As with all book to movie adaptations, see the movie first. If you’ve read the book already, you tend to notice what’s missing. If you see the picture, those images can actually enlarge the playing field of the written word and make the book more enjoyable.

But fans of books often find themselves somewhat disappointed with the movie. As a young viewer seeing “The Wizard of Oz” for the first time in Vass, I remember being very disappointed to find Dorothy’s visit to Oz reduced to a bump on the head and a bad dream in the movie version.

Of late, the silver screen has brought us first Middle Earth, then Potter, now Narnia — movie lands peopled with animated creatures (some with eerily familiar voices) talking animals, and folks who first lived in much-loved books.

Mixing live actors and animation is tough.

You won’t find CGI in “The Wizard of Oz” — all the animals in that classic are live actors wearing animal suits. Other shows with talking animals and heroic humans use movie magic to make real animals appear to talk. Others animate everybody (“101 Dalmations,” “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” — the Boris Karloff version).

Opening at Sand Hills Cinemas is Andre Adamson’s cinematic adaptation of “The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” — first (and best) of C. S. Lewis’s seven-volume classic children’s epic. Lewis wrote it against the background of children exiled to the British countryside in hopes of escaping the London blitz as war raged across the continent. Four such children find their way into a magical land full of chatty creatures, and chilled under the spells of a wicked White Witch — brilliantly and terrifyingly played by Tilda Swinton.

The kids are a bit better, a bit more fleshed out, but still the somewhat bland Disney kids we know from lots of movies. You won’t mind that.

There are hardly any pop culture references. For some (lucky or blessed) reason there is a near total absence of that creeping mold that seems to cover everything done for young people in recent years.

You may sense something of Adamson’s own directing history (”Shrek”) now and then. He is dealing with material that could have seemed very dated. Fans of the books will look for, and find, Lewis’s work fairly and honestly present.

The picture, thankfully, stands well on its own, complete in itself. Even with detectably computer-contrived images (a Lion with Liam Neeson’s voice) contrasted with human actors, Lewis’s well-told tale dominates.

This movie is doubtless going to be one of the best treats of the year, a classic on DVD as well as hard and paper back book form. There is, as Lewis intended, a Christian allegory at its heart, an English literary tradition as old as “The Pilgrim’s Progress.” Nobody will mind, any more than anybody minds the Dionysian religion at the heart of the ancient tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, or Euripedes.

Older structures than any of these frame many a story — strange land, perilous journey, epic battle, blood ties, winter and spring — and so they do what is very likely to be but the first film of “The Chronicles of Narnia.”