Paddington

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  Sweet Deals

  May 22, 2025 at 8:29 am

  Paddington is a fun, beautifully animated children’s movie. It is based on a beloved classic of British children’s literature, which has been since been adapted into television shows, cartoons, and now feature films. Paddington is very much a fixture of a much simpler, more innocent time, and the movie Paddington tries to update the classic to fit a modern 21st century Britain that is much busier, colder, and more sarcastic about itself while playing up the nostalgia of the older 20th century Britain that had a firmer sense of pride in its own identity.

  Like most modern live-action adaptions of children’s cartoons, Paddington uses CGI very heavily in its cinematography. On the one hand, it’s very well rendered and the colors are bright, but on the other hand, I find it excessive to the point of being showy. It’s supposed to be a live-action film, but the CGI is so detailed, so dynamic and so kinetic that the animated portions end up looking more real than reality. Every hair on the bears is individually rendered and shakes a lot. Every little part of every little thing has been rendered to look so perfect and too many things move around too much. It goes beyond convincing me that the digital renderings are seamlessly part of the real world and more like I’m watching a commercial trying to sell me orange marmalade. Also ironically, while in the cartoons you see animated characters behaving like sincere human beings, in the live-action adaption you have real human actors playing their roles in an extra cartoonish manner. It’s not enough to simply be ordinary, humble people anymore. Every character has to have some kind of hyper-exaggerated shtick to make them stand out. It’s not enough to have a hobby or a talent; nowadays the main characters have to be gifted to the point of being borderline superheroes in order to make the grade. And it’s not enough to simply be an ordinary family who does ordinary things; there needs to be a vicious villain with an evil plot in order to create dramatic tension and have everyone use their super-powered skills to come together and “save the day”. Speaking of the villain, while I know she was evil and did some really nasty things, I didn’t think she deserved to be punished by being buried under a pile of manure. She didn’t need to kidnap Paddington and have him taxidermied in order to vindicate her late father. All she had to do was bring the living, talking Paddington Bear to the explorer’s club as an example of what her father found in Darkest Peru. Her father would be vindicated, Paddington would still be alive, and everyone would win. However, as we all know, humiliating the bad guy is far more important than problem-solving when it comes to silly movies like this.

  Another thing that I considered to be too much was the element of chaos. In the original books, Paddington does have a habit of making a huge mess of things. It’s a common theme in children’s literature: Paddington is a stand-in for the children in the audience, and young children make honest mistakes because they may be absent-minded, clumsy or simply don’t understand what’s going on and are curious to find out. A kind-hearted adult (such as a veteran parent) will be patient and understanding, while a more pompous adult (such as an obnoxious neighbor or a stiff-necked authority figure) might get flustered and subsequently humbled by the experience. In the original book, there’s a scene where Paddington makes a mess and floods the bathroom because he’s being absent-minded. In the movie, I felt that the filmmakers were intentionally exaggerating the sequence to be as chaotic and disgusting as possible. In the original book, there’s a scene where Paddington falls behind at the train station and sets off the emergency stop on the escalator in a well-intentioned attempt to find his lost family. In the escalator sequence in the movie, I felt that the filmmakers had Paddington intentionally misunderstand several posted notices with the intent of creating chaos for cheap laughs. I’m not fond of chaos-for-the-sake-of-chaos; I find it more annoying than funny, and this movie is full of it.

  Let’s move on to potentially objectionable elements. There is a point during the movie where Paddington and Mr. Brown have to sneak into the archives, and Mr. Brown is forced to dress up as an old lady custodian in order to avoid suspicion. It goes on further as the guard asks Mr. Brown for an ID, and Mr. Brown has to justify why he’s not as ugly as the woman he’s impersonating. When Paddington and Mr. Brown flee the scene in a hurry, the guard calls Mr. Brown a “sexy lady”. I’d file this under more of that “needless chaos” I’ve been grumbling on about.

  Another thing I’d mention is Mr. Curry. In the books and cartoons, Mr. Curry is an unpleasant neighbor who doesn’t like Paddington because of the bear’s tendency to muck things up. In the movie, Mr. Curry is still unpleasant, but he’s also treated as a sap who falls in love with the villain at first sight and she uses her feminine wiles to take advantage of him and then double-crosses him later. The villain gets Mr. Curry on her side by telling him she’s trying to get rid of the bear and that if she doesn’t, the neighborhood will be overrun with bears in a manner that suggests Mr. Curry is racist against foreigner bears. This is one of those things that probably was too subtle to be woke in 2014 but seems a little more off-putting now. For the record, Paddington moved to Britain from Darkest Peru because his family was enamored by British culture and he genuinely wanted to be British. Here in the present day, there are a lot of foreigners living in Britain who don’t respect and even resent the native culture. A talking bear from Peru who likes to eat marmalade sandwiches seems rather quaint by comparison.

  Don’t let my nitpicking hamper your enjoyment of the movie. I’m just an old-fashioned grump who is unimpressed and overwhelmed by the modern obsession of “bigger is better”. I believe less is more, and a little humility and restraint makes for better storytelling than CGI, chaos and a ton of padding.

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