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“Paddington” Perfectly Captures a Particular English Sensibility

It’s a risky business, going to see a movie adapted from a beloved children’s book. Young readers are able to conjure an entire fictional world so vividly inside their heads that a film director’s efforts at translation can seem redundant, or even worse. Sometimes, a director’s vision can overwhelm the original: watching Spike Jonze’s “Where The Wild Things Are”—even if one admires the movie—requires an acquiescence to Jonze’s own idiosyncratic reading of Maurice Sendak’s classic picture book, a substitution of Jonze’s imagination for one’s own. Sometimes an adaptation is transparently meretricious: the 2012 movie “The Lorax” had none of the delightfulness of the 1971 book, and instead partook of the thoughtless consumption and commercialism that Dr. Seuss sought to critique.

“Paddington,” which is based upon the beloved series of books by Michael Bond about a bear found by a family at a London train station, might so easily have been a disappointment. The trailer was not altogether promising. It showcased a gross-out scene—Paddington sticking toothbrushes in his ears and loading them with earwax; Paddington sticking his head down the toilet for a drink—and featured Paddington riding a claw-foot bathtub down a spiral staircase, on a wave of excess bath water. Humor based on scatology or bodily secretions, and the use of roller-coaster special effects, seems obligatory in children’s movies, at least those made in the United States or Britain. (Hayao Miyazaki manages without them.) But they don’t figure prominently in the original books, where the extent of Bond’s bathroom humor was to have Paddington’s bathtub overflow.

In fact, “Paddington,” directed by Paul King, offers a wonderfully winning interpretation of Bond’s original. As the critics have pointed out, it successfully interpolates a plot that’s absent in any of the Paddington books, with Nicole Kidman gleefully enacting the role of a museum director with a taxidermy fetish. And Ben Whishaw’s vocal performance as the bear himself—polite, curious, hopeful—is endearing, even if the presence of teeth in Paddington’s animated mouth takes some getting used to, especially for viewers raised not just on the books but also on the stop-motion television adaptation that aired on British TV in the late seventies and early eighties. (For those not raised thus, here is the first episode .)

But “Paddington” isn’t just about a bear; it’s about an entire cultural milieu. The movie has pitch-perfect tone for a very English register of resignation. Consider the police officer who, upon hearing Mrs. Brown’s description of the missing Paddington—three feet six, with a battered hat and duffel coat, and he’s a bear—replies dolefully, “That’s not much to go on.” Then there is the pair of security guards quizzing each other on the nutritional value of a packet of biscuits—measuring out their lives with carbohydrate counts. It is a perfect vignette of a failure so profound it passes for pleasure.

In the way that it captures this cramped Englishness, “Paddington” is reminiscent, at times, of Mike Leigh, at least when Leigh is at his most forgiving. (Leigh, who typically snarls at the affluent, would likely be far less patient than King is with the Browns, who appear to have risen with the tide of gentrification, and inhabit a handsome house in one of London’s most desirable corners.) This impression is reinforced by King’s use of actors beloved by Leigh: Mrs. Brown, now mildly bohemian, is played by Sally Hawkins, who starred in Leigh’s “Happy Go Lucky”; Mr. Gruber, the Hungarian immigrant who owns an antique shop on Portobello Road, is played by Jim Broadbent, another Leigh favorite; Paddington’s Aunt Lucy has the voice of Imelda Staunton, who was remarkable in Leigh’s “Vera Drake.” King’s casting choices are often inspired, and, like the Harry Potter films, with which “Paddington” shares a producer, David Heyman, the movie is studded with appearances by celebrated British character actors and comic performers. These include Julie Walters—whose Mrs. Bird, in an acknowledgment of changing social mores, is now a relative of the Browns, rather than their housekeeper—and Geoffrey Palmer, a familiar face to anyone who grew up watching English television sitcoms of the seventies and eighties. Among other roles, Palmer was the phlegmatic guest at Fawlty Towers who insisted upon sausages for breakfast, even as the staff struggled to dispose of an inconvenient corpse.

Ostensibly, “Paddington” is about the unexpected openness of contemporary British society: the fact that even a bear from Darkest Peru can find a way to be at home in Notting Hill. But underneath that message, there is also a fond, amused depiction of enduring aspects of national character. The movie offers a gently satirical portrait of a particular English upper-middle-class sensibility: liberal, but sometimes effortfully so; emotionally restrained, but not lacking in feeling, for all that restraint. Hugh Bonneville’s Mr. Brown, who mutters “stranger danger” at his first sight of Paddington—while hustling his family along the train platform after a wholesomely educational visit to a Victorian wool museum—is a poignant representative of the middle-aged English man who so embraces limitation that he has persuaded himself that limitation is his preference. Hawkins’s Mrs. Brown, with her earnest, rebuffed attempts to sustain the connection of childhood with Judy, her sullen teen-age daughter—she brightly, desperately “darling”s Judy, almost to distraction—is the quivering embodiment of well-meaning, middle-class metropolitan motherhood.

In this sense, “Paddington” is imbued with an awareness about its cultural role that its literary precursor never had. (Bond did not know that he was creating a global phenomenon when he wrote the first of his books.) Mr. Brown, a viewer senses, is the kind of person who is pained by the omnipresence of gross-out humor in children’s movies, but if “Paddington” has gentle fun with the onset of his cultural conservatism, it doesn’t really judge him for it. Meanwhile, in its fleshing out of the character of Mrs. Brown from Bond’s original, “Paddington” makes a suggestive choice. Mrs. Brown might have had any career; given the comforts of the Bonds’ home, a remunerative one might have been most realistic. Instead, she belongs to the marginal fellowship of authors: she is a writer and illustrator of children’s books. That the movie makes a nod to the vivid and enduring appeal to the young imagination of the literary, in spite of the stimulations and seductions of the screen, is part of its charm and its truth.

Be thinking

Hannah Rowe's film review and discussion guide to Paddington , helps us think through the ideas and issues raised by the film.

In darkest Peru a young bear (Ben Wishaw) has grown up in the care of his Uncle Pastuzo (Michael Gambon) and Aunt Lucy (Imelda Staunton). But these are no ordinary bears. After the visit of a British explorer (Tim Downie) many years before, Pastuzo and Lucy have learnt to talk. They are fluent in British manners and have a passion for marmalade. The family dreams of visiting the London the explorer told them about, where he promised they would always receive a warm welcome. When a violent storm destroys their idyllic life, Aunt Lucy sends her nephew to fulfil the family dream. With a suitcase filled with jars of marmalade, his Uncle's hat (complete with emergency marmalade sandwich inside) and a label saying "Please look after this bear, thank you" , the young bear stows away on a ship bound for the golden city.

Warning: This article contains major plot spoilers.

When he arrives, however, all is not quite as expected. In the hustle and bustle of Paddington Station no one replies to a small bear's polite greetings and requests for a home. Enter the Brown family – Mary (Sally Hawkins), Henry (Hugh Bonneville) and their children Jonathan (Samuel Joslin) and Judy (Madeleine Harris). Untrusting Henry hurries them past the forlorn-looking bear but Mary takes pity, naming him Paddington and offering shelter.

As the clumsy, kind-hearted bear starts to make friends and learn how to live in this strange new world, the search for a permanent home becomes the least of his worries. For a fanatical taxidermist (Nicole Kidman) has heard of the arrival of this unusual specimen and has her sights set on a new addition to her collection. How will Paddington escape her evil clutches? As the Browns begin to realise that they need Paddington just as much as he needs them, can they help him in time?

I bought a small toy bear on Christmas Eve 1956. I saw it left on a shelf in a London store and felt sorry for it. I took it home as a present for my wife Brenda and named it Paddington as we were living near Paddington Station at the time. I wrote some stories about the bear, more for fun than with the idea of having them published. After ten days I found that I had a book on my hands. It wasn't written specifically for children, but I think I put into it the kind things I liked reading about when I was young. Michael Bond [1]

Little was Bond to know that the publication of A Bear Called Paddington in 1958 was the beginning of a hugely successful franchise, with Paddington Bear featuring in more than 150 books of varying formats and starring in several television series. Now the marmalade-loving bear stars in his own feature film. Paddington 's director and screenwriter, Paul King ( Bunny and the Bull , 2009; The Mighty Boosh , 2004-2007), says that "more than anything" they "wanted to be true to the Michael Bond Stories" . [2]

The character of Paddington was animated by Framestore, who worked on the award-winning Gravity (2013). Although having a bear as a main character was in some ways a challenge, Bond explains that it brings many positives:

The great advantage of having a bear as a central character is that he can combine the innocence of a child with the sophistication of an adult. [...] He gets involved in everyday situations. He has a strong sense of right and wrong and doesn't take kindly to the red tape bureaucracy of the sillier rules and regulations with which we humans surround ourselves. As a bear he gets away with things. Paddington is humanised, but he couldn't possibly be 'human'. It just wouldn't work.

Paddington was voiced by Ben Wishaw ( Skyfall , 2012; Bright Star , 2009), a late addition to the project after Colin Firth departed by mutual agreement. Producer David Heyman (The Harry Potter series, 2001-2011; Gravity , 2013) explains: "he knew before we knew that he wasn't right. His voice was too mature, too deep. It didn't have that youthful spring" . [3] Hugh Bonneville ( Downton Abbey , 2010-2014; The Monuments Men , 2014) and Sally Hawkins ( Blue Jasmine , 2013; Great Expectations , 2012) star as Henry and Mary Brown. King was really pleased with their performances:

They spent a day together without me, improvising, and then the next day we all worked together and by the end of that day we'd rewritten all their scenes. They're properly funny and so good at getting under the skin of a slightly bickering married couple. [4]

Bond's inspiration for Paddington was partly taken from wartime memories of evacuee children passing through train stations: "They all had a label round their neck with their name and address on and a little case or package containing all their treasured possessions. So Paddington, in a sense, was a refugee, and I do think that there's no sadder sight than refugees." [5] Heyman highlights this theme, describing the story of Paddington Bear as "a classic immigration story in many ways, about someone looking for a home" . [6]

This theme shines through in the film's soundtrack, which features the calypso songs played by the immigrant community who made their home in Notting Hill, where Paddington eventually settles, at the time Bond first started writing the books. King comments: "This is the music being made in the place where these books were written, by people who arrived on these shores. It felt like such a glorious gift – they are really upbeat positive songs – for the most part – all about that experience." [7] King also had the band, D Lime, playing onscreen at points in the story, and he believes that this "adds to the magic of our London that there's always a band playing the song that happens to reflect your feelings." [8]

King believes that for animated characters, such as Paddington, to work well in films the setting needs to be a "slightly magical universe" . [9] He explains that they "tried to make London heightened enough that the idea of a bear walking down the street wasn't a freak of nature, where it's a curiosity but you won't call the police" . [10] King further explains how they went about creating this 'heightened' reality:

It was nice to use some of those visual devices that maybe aren't in every kid's talking animal film, and I had to justify them, I suppose, but it was quite easy to say we're trying to tell the story of an outsider, and he keeps looking at different worlds he could be part of – like London in the snow globe, or the doll's house, and he always feels at a remove. It's a simple image system, but it works really nicely, it's nice to be able to use some of those visual flourishes and give you something a little different from what you might be used to. [11]

88-year-old Bond, who has a cameo in the film, has declared it "a delight from start to finish" . [12] Critics largely agreed with this assessment. The Guardian called it "a charming and sweet-natured family film, full of wit and fun, skewed towards young children but cheekily speckled with sly gags pitched at the older audience" . [13] Meanwhile Empire concluded that "Marmaladen with gloriously silly jokes, pitch-perfect performances and incidental detail, this is a warm, witty and wondrously inventive great big bear-hug of a movie." [14] .

Film title: Paddington Director: Paul King Screenplay: Paul King and Hamish McColl, based on the books by Michael Bond Starring: Ben Whishaw (voice), Julie Walters, Sally Hawkins, Hugh Bonneville, Peter Capaldi, Jim Broadbent, Nicole Kidman, Michael Gambon (voice), Imelda Staunton (voice), Matt Lucas Distributor: Studiocanal Cinema Release Date: 28th November 2014 Certificate: PG (UK) – dangerous behaviour, mild threat, innuendo, infrequent mild bad language

Questions for discussion

Key to the symbols.

[1] From the official Paddington website . [2] Chris Hewitt, 'Paul King Talks Paddington ' , Empire , accessed 28th November 2014. [3] Sheryl Garratt, 'Paddington producer David Heyman: "I Still Have My Teddy Bear From When I Was Four"' , The Telegraph , 23rd November 2014. [4] Chris Hewitt, 'Paul King Talks Paddington ' , Empire , accessed 28th November 2014. [5] Michelle Pauli, 'Michael Bond: "Paddington Stands Up for Things, He's Not Afraid of Going to the Top and Giving Them a Hard Stare"' , The Guardian , 28th November 2014. [6] Sheryl Garratt, ' Paddington producer David Heyman: "I Still Have My Teddy Bear From When I Was Four"' , The Telegraph , 23rd November 2014. [7] Tim Masters, 'The Story Behind Paddington 's Calypso Songs' , BBC News , 28th November 2014. [8] Tim Masters, 'The Story Behind Paddington 's Calypso Songs' , BBC News , 28th November 2014. [9] Chris Hewitt, 'Paul King Talks Paddington ' , Empire , accessed 28th November 2014. [10] Chris Hewitt, 'Paul King Talks Paddington ' , Empire , accessed 28th November 2014. [11] Chris Hewitt, 'Paul King Talks Paddington ' , Empire , accessed 28th November 2014. [12] Michelle Pauli, 'Michael Bond: "Paddington Stands Up for Things, He's Not Afraid of Going to the Top and Giving Them a Hard Stare"' , The Guardian , 28th November 2014. [13] Peter Bradshaw, ' Paddington Review - Charming and Cheeky' , The Guardian , 27th November 2014. [14] Chris Hewitt, ' Paddington ' , Empire , accessed 1st December 2014.

© 2014 Hannah Rowe

Hannah Rowe

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On His Best Behavior and Hoping to Fit In

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By Roslyn Sulcas

• Jan. 9, 2015

LONDON — He is an illegal immigrant, small, brown and different-looking, lonely and unwelcome in a metropolis in which people try hard not to notice other people’s problems. Carrying a battered suitcase that contains very little, he encounters hostility, rudeness and indifference, and must battle prejudice and enmity.

Yes, it’s Paddington, the young bear who arrived in London from Darkest Peru in Michael Bond’s “A Bear Called Paddington” in 1958, and who is today a beloved staple of children’s literature in Britain and its former colonies. In the new film “Paddington,” directed by Paul King and due on Jan. 16 in the United States, these themes of immigration, tolerance and welcome (or the lack thereof) are given particular emphasis, perhaps not coincidental in a political climate here that has seen the rapid rise of the right-wing United Kingdom Independence Party, which blames immigration for most of Britain’s woes.

But “Paddington” is also a children’s film, and the filmmakers have stayed faithful to the essence of Mr. Bond’s marmalade-loving, hat-wearing, scrupulously polite character, who despite his foreign origins embodies a quintessential Englishness — or perhaps a platonic idea of what it means to be English. The Paddington adventures — Mr. Bond has written 15 to date, the most recent (“Love From Paddington”) appeared this year — begin when the Brown family finds the bear at Paddington station with a label around his neck: “Please look after this bear.”

Mr. King has done just that, judging by the reviews when the film opened here in November.

“The heart of this sweet-natured ursine klutz beats strong and true in a film which takes a tale of a bear in search of a home and expands it into a sticky furry love letter to London,” Wendy Ide wrote in the British newspaper The Times.

In an interview in the study, adorned with Paddington drawings and book proofs, of his West London home, Mr. Bond, 88, said that the label detail came from memories of seeing evacuated children at rail stations during World War II. “They all had labels around their necks and were holding on to their treasured possessions,” he said. “It was very sad, and Paddington is also a refugee in that way.”

Nicole Kidman, who plays the evil taxidermist Millicent (guess what she wants to do with Paddington?), said in a phone interview that she was particularly struck by the script’s allusion to the war and its parallels. “In a quiet way, it reminds you of history and brings you to now,” she said. “There is definitely a theme of welcoming strangers in the movie and reminding us we’re all different. And to be kind. Those are important things to teach to children.”

The film makes use of the label history in an opening sequence that amusingly explains how Paddington (renamed by the Browns when his Peruvian moniker proves to be a throaty growl) learned English — as well as how to make marmalade and the values of British stoicism and politesse. He brings unwitting chaos to almost every situation, but the sweetness and optimism of his character always prevails.

“He possesses 1950s morals and values, but they don’t seem inappropriate today,” said David Heyman, the movie’s producer (his credits include the Harry Potter movies and “Gravity”). “If someone is rude or out of line, he’ll give them the hard stare.”

The “hard stare” is familiar to generations who grew up with Mr. Bond’s stories and the animated “Paddington” films that ran on BBC TV in the 1970s and 1980s: “It was a very powerful stare. One which his Aunt Lucy had taught him and which he kept for special occasions.”

Until now, however, there hasn’t been a feature-length film. “I think there were various projects that didn’t work out,” Mr. King said in a telephone interview. “But I think even a decade ago, the technology wouldn’t have been able to do what we’ve done here.”

As it happens, the film, a mix of live action and animation, took almost a decade to produce. Mr. Heyman, who had, like every other self-respecting Brit, read the books as a child, rediscovered them through an associate and began, he said, to work on the project eight or nine years ago. “I was struck that I still found them amusing and that there was humor for adults and children alike,” he said.

Mr. King, 36, who had directed a hit comedy television series here, “ The Mighty Boosh ,” and was working on his first feature film, “Bunny and the Bull,” when he met Mr. Heyman, was not an obvious choice for a larger enterprise of this kind. (Mr. Heyman declined to specify the budget for “Paddington,” although articles have given a figure of around $55 million.)

“When I jokingly suggested to my agent that he ask David for a meeting, he said, ‘Don’t be ridiculous,’ ” Mr. King recounted. “But we did meet, and it became clear we shared the same idea of what the film could be. We had lots of pretentious conversations about what we could do; we talked about Tarkovsky and Genet and Chaplin. The great thing with David is because he has had all the success with “Harry Potter,” he doesn’t have the commercial pressures that most producers have, so he was willing to take a chance with me.”

The film required a long gestation, he added, because of the animation (created by the London-based Framestore) needed to bring its principal character to life alongside the actors, who included Sally Hawkins and Hugh Bonneville, of “ Downton Abbey ” fame, as the Browns.

“We had to work out every scene with Paddington in it in great detail in terms of physical action and timing,” Mr. King explained. “Each had to be filmed with the actors often just playing to a bit of tape, although we had a brilliant physical comedian” — Javier Marzan — “who would sometimes help us work out the sequences.” Then, he said, the animators would give him a rough outline of a face and gradually flesh out the details as he coordinated the sound, the movement and the visual effect.

Then, when Colin Firth’s voice proved to be wrong for Paddington, and Ben Whishaw was chosen to replace him, every Paddington scene had to be redone. “Any little facial expressions have to match with the voice,” Mr. King explained, adding that there were often 400 to 500 versions of every shot that involved Paddington.

“It’s a funny process, because it’s a chicken-and-egg thing,” Mr. Whishaw said in a telephone interview. “Do the words inform the bear’s expression, or does the expression influence the intonation? It was very magical to see it come together.”

Mr. Bonneville and Ms. Kidman both said they had grown up reading the books and leapt at the chance to be in the film. “I got a message that David Heyman wanted to talk to me about Paddington, and I thought, maybe I was too old to play Paddington? Then it became apparent it wasn’t that, and my heart sank,” Mr. Bonneville recounted in deadpan fashion. “So I settled for the buttoned-up father who eventually releases his inner bear.”

(This partly involves a plot twist in which Mr. Bonneville dressed up in drag, which resulted in the British Board of Film Classification giving the movie a PG rating and describing it as containing “mild sex references.” After a bout of national media outrage, this was changed to “innuendo.”)

Mr. Bond, who has a cameo (he raises his hat to Paddington from a taxi), said he was pleased the filmmakers hadn’t made Paddington too cuddly. “He isn’t cute,” Mr. Bond said decisively. “He is quite a serious bear. His feet are firmly on the ground.”

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