This time round, the landscape has changed somewhat; apart from the briefest of reappearances, there is no queen, and the lion Aslan, voiced by Liam Neeson, is very much on the sidelines, having gone missing since the children’s last visit a year before (which apparently amounts to over a millennium in Narnia years). The exquisite centaurs and swashbuckling mice of Narnian legend have been banished to the periphery of the magic kingdom by a menacing foreign army, the Telmarines, who have somehow effected regime change and forced the true ruler, Prince Caspian (played by the young British newcomer Ben Barnes), to take refuge in the wooded wilderness. The Pevensie four — entering the kingdom this time not through a wardrobe but via a grimy London Tube station — are there to put this world to rights.

The manner in which they do it kept the two children I had with me at the screening — Zac, aged nine, and Raff, five — completely enthralled for almost two-and-a-half hours. There were none of the superfluous trips to the loo or requests for more popcorn that usually punctuate our visits to the pictures, even in the middle of the latest piece of frenetic, high-tech, supposedly child-friendly whiz-bang animation. Yes, I’m sure that they were completely unaware of any subliminal messages, but then, so would I have been if I hadn’t been boning up on Polly beforehand. Rather, what kept our attention was, essentially, another set of traditional but unfashionable and derided values and qualities: superb linear story-telling, Good setting its face unequivocally against Bad, and — in Peter, Susan, Edmund and Lucy — a group of school children with aspirations to adulthood, decency and solid, foursquare resourcefulness.

The fashioning of Lewis’s story is, of course, down to the director, and as with the first instalment, Andrew Adamson handles it expertly. Auteurs be banished — directing in the context of an epic such as this is more akin to being a military strategist, and Adamson marshals his CGI armies and flesh-and-blood kings and queens with flawless precision, up to and including a stupendously staged final battle, which sees the very ground collapsing from underneath the feet of charging Telmarines. And in an era in which Hollywood seems to have given up completely on the ability of the average adult to concentrate for more than 30 seconds, this family picture even dares to let the talky bits flow, by which time the audience is on side enough to repay the compliment.