As this is clearly a children’s movie I had no interest in it. But after the sequel was released last year I heard some very good things about it and it hasn’t escaped my attention that it has an insanely high Rotten Tomatoes rating. This first film isn’t as highly regarded but is still considered quite okay so I thought it would be appropriate to watch it before the sequel.
As I’m sure everyone who is unfamiliar with the character has been wondering about, Paddington hails from a species of intelligent bears who are native to Peru. Decades ago they were discovered by a British explorer who managed to teach them English. In the present, Paddington is a young bear raised by his uncle and aunt. After his uncle is killed in an earthquake, his aunt sends him to London in search of the explorer who has promised to welcome them. Of course this proves more difficult than expected due to the sheer size of the city and the poor bear ends up hanging out at the train station. Eventually he encounters the Brown family with the mother Mary Brown being sympathetic to his plight while the father Henry is skeptical. They take him in temporarily, planning only to hand him in to the authorities and help him find the explorer but naturally he grows on the family despite the trouble he gets into. Meanwhile an evil taxidermist recognizes his species and is determined to stuff him and add him to her collection.
I think this is the first time I’ve seen one of these new generation of films that are mostly live action with added CGI characters and I have to say that the animation for the bears look incredible. The performances of all of the actors are perfectly integrated with the bears and the whole film looks great. It’s a huge improvement in quality compared to earlier CGI efforts. The plot itself is the standard, predictable fare that at least makes no mistakes. It is weird that no one in this world seems to find intelligent bears particularly odd but that’s just how this film rolls. Paddington manages to get up to way more chaos than I expected and while it isn’t exactly funny to me it is exactly quite spectacular.
Perhaps just as impressive is how it works in serious and current themes in what is after all a children’s film. Writer and director Paul King recognized that Paddington, a foreign bear who wishes to live in the United Kingdom, is a tale of immigration and makes the celebration of diversity a central theme. Musical accompaniment takes the form of a Calypso band whose members sing about how much they love London. The nosy and hateful neighbor Mr. Curry is clearly meant to evoke a typical UKIP or even British National Party voter. At the same time, a lot of the appeal of the franchise is the way it strong asserts its British, idiosyncratic identity beginning with the name Paddington itself, the appearance of a bobby hat, the love of marmalade and his distinctive raincoat. The message is of course that someone can be both foreign-born and British. Given the extremely hostile climate in Europe to immigrants these days, the courage to take this stand is laudable.
As a children’s show, one shouldn’t expect too much from it and it’s not much more than light entertainment. The only real dislikes on my part is how cartoonish the villain is, even if it’s surprising to see Nicole Kidman in the role. I’d rate this as a decent effort all around.