Oh, I loved those books. And I was surprised to find that the movie really lived up to the first. It was made by the same people as the Lord of the Rings trilogy, and is somewhere between those movies and Narnia, if you ask me. Those movies were eaten up. Golden Compass probably won't get a sequel, because of the bad press it's been getting.

Though the books were noticeably anti-religion, the producers specifically took those things out of the movie so that it wouldn't be associated with atheism.