You could call this movie Utterly Delightful and my eyes would do the exact opposite of roll. This film, from start to finish, is a joyous, delightful, and incrementally heartwarming exercise in storytelling. There’s an increasingly welcome amount of gentle British humor. Paddington himself, a CGI creation, avoids the uncanny valley by having the kindest brown eyes ever. The characters are as charming as they are relatable. I thought I knew what I was getting with Paddington before it even started, and where I went wrong is where the film goes ever more right.
The most delightful thing to me, and which makes it as pure a moving picture book as I’ve ever seen, is how Paddington is received by the world. It’s rather odd seeing a 3-foot-6 bear walking around a train station. Even more so that he speaks rather perfect English. But there are no alarms. There is no Animal Control Center salivating at the scene. Paddington simply is who he is, an upright-walking, English-speaking bear looking for a home, and that’s that. In a culture that seems to want to explain everything away – ‘origin story’ and ‘prequel’ seem to be even bigger buzz words in Hollywood than ‘profit’ – it’s rather refreshing to see all the unusual business accepted for what it is.
And there’s a lot of delightful unusual business in this film: an incredibly charming backstory (this is an origin I can get excited by) regarding an overprotective father; a bizarre, but well-meaning neighbor in Peter Capaldi; Jim Broadbent’s white shock of hair; a grandmother who judges the weather based on how her knees feel. The list goes on. In fact, the most usual, standard bit of business in the film – a villain played by Nicole Kidman – almost seems at odds with the rest of the story’s whimsical nature. They sanded just enough edges off of Kidman’s character and ultimate plans to keep it from letting the darker parts overwhelm the lighter parts of the story, and by the end it all works out.
Speaking of the ending: Devin Faraci referenced this during his own screening of Paddington, and it’s a very real thing here. There is a moment where you really do fear for Paddington’s well-being. You know there’s no way he will die, but like the furnace scene from Toy Story 3, there is an element of danger that is pushed about as far as it can go.
