Saturday Evening Movie Thread - 6/7/2025

Paddington Brown

Shot and reverse from Paddington. The first is Michael Bond, and the second is his creation, the bear from Darkest Peru.
In October of 1958, Michael Bond published the first of what would end up being 30 picture books and collections starring a small bear from Darkest Peru. Sent to London by his Aunt Lucy who has retired to the Home for Retired Bears in Lima, Paddington was adopted by the Brown family and had a series of small adventures over the next 60 years until 2017. It was then that Bond's final book, Paddington's Finest Hour was published with Bond passing that year.

Over the decades, Paddington has been adapted into different mediums, mostly television with his most famous example being a 1970s British television show that featured the bear as a stop motion puppet and all of the other characters as cardboard cutouts. This combination of his books and various adaptations has placed him in a special place in the hearts of the British public. I watched an interview with a British actor who, in an effort to describe the importance of Clifford the Big Red Dog to a British audience, compared the large red pup with Paddington, the explicit effort being to build up Clifford as this massively important cartoon character for the American psyche.

And I think he's full of bunk. Clifford isn't important to Americans. The closest might be Snoopy from Peanuts, but Snoopy was a minor character in an ensemble. Mickey Mouse? No one cares about him past five years old. Garfield? He's more of a joke than a beloved character. No, I don't think there is an American counterpart to the beloved picture book character.

And, of course, I bring him up because of the trilogy of movies starring Paddington Brown released over the past decade.

Now, I don't often do recommendations (I think it irritates people that I sidestep them most of the time), but I'm going to do this now: watch the Paddington films. I'll detail why later, but you won't be disappointed.

However, I write not to recommend, but mostly to wallow in one of the interesting areas of film that I always find fascinating: adaptation.

Picture Books

What are the original adventures of Paddington? They are 20-30 page long picture books written for small children (my younger son loves them). They involve the small bear from Darkest Peru leaving the house for some outing, usually around London, having small misunderstandings, and going back home where he usually does some art. So, he'll go to the London Zoo, pack some extra marmalade sandwiches, watch helplessly as the animals steal them one by one, and then go home and draw pictures of the animals. Or, he'll go with his friend Mr. Gruber to Hyde Park to view the local artists, misunderstand some English idioms, and then go home to paint his own art. They're cute stories to tell to small children right before bed.

They are not the stuff to build a 90-minute movie out of.

So the choices becomes almost limitless as to how to approach the material. Paul King, the writer and director of the first two films, made very deliberate choices that I find fascinating, and they are the reason I felt compelled to write this essay. Essentially, he turned the first cinematic adventure of the bear from Darkest Peru into...a heist film. The second turns into an outright Mission Impossible film. On the surface, that should not connect. That should not make sense. That should actually worry people who love the Paddington books. And yet, he makes it work, and it's due to a few things.

The first is that he preserves the characters, especially the central bear. Paddington in the film is warm, open-hearted, and almost Pollyanna-esque in his ability to simply make people's lives better around him. The one character who seems to start the furthest away from the source is the patriarch of the Brown family, Mr. Brown played by Hugh Bonneville, who spends the first half of the first movie trying to kick Paddington out of the house until he realizes that Paddington is part of the family and worthy of not only housing but his protection. That preservation of sweet characterization balances with the more adult approach to narrative in the use of genre conventions that usually don't show up in children's movies.

The stakes are appropriate for the family movie space (though, let's be honest, Nicole Kidman desiring taxidermy directed at Paddington is perhaps a tad on the extreme side of things), but the conventions of heist filmmaking suddenly place the character in a kind of film enjoyed by many adults without going super violent. The tone remains cheerful and jaunty and innocent, even while the stakes are elevated from the books and the plot mechanics deal in a group of people breaking into a place, all using their special skills in unique ways (which the films use as a source of comedy), to rescue someone from a terrible fate. And the second one escalates to an extended train sequence against Hugh Grant as the antagonist right out of the first Mission Impossible film. And King makes the connection explicit by using the Mission Impossible theme at one point in the first film.

The third, directing duties taken over by Dougal Wilson with a trio of writers, takes the film in a more adventure direction, sending Paddington and the Browns into the jungles of Peru to search for Aunt Lucy who has gone missing. Here, Antonio Bandares wants Paddington for his own greedy ends, and we have the preservation of character and silly episodes strung along an adventure plot that retains the charm of the first two films.

These are such weird, out of left-field choices, and yet King and Wilson make them work wonderfully well. It's that balance between innocence in character, preserved from the stories, and a structure taken from more adult-orientated fare that can carry a whole film. It's not just a series of individual episodes loosely strung together. They are self-contained stories.

Episodes


When thinking of the Paddington stories, they feel more like fodder for a children's television show than a feature film. They last only a few minutes. They have no real stakes. They're over and done with without much changing from one to the next. And yet, in terms of adaptation, King does not discard them completely. In fact, he integrates individual stories shockingly well. The most famous example would be the adaption of the first book, A Bear Called Paddington, into, essentially, the first thirty minutes of the first film. However, it'sthe book Paddington at the Barber Shop that gets the best utilization.

It happens in the second film. Paddington needs money to purchase a pop-up book for his Aunt Lucy's birthday (in the story, he is trying to help his friend Mr. Gruber pay for a broken vase). So, he gets a job at the barber where he has some mishaps and accidentally ruins the hair of a customer. However, the film uses this expertly to help progress the story because the customer is a magistrate judge who gets the case of Paddington when he's framed for theft of the pop-up book by Phoenix Buchanan (Grant). So, with animus towards the bear, the judge sentences Paddington to prison. It's a recreation of one of the more famous Paddington stories that is integrated perfectly into the actual plot of the book, acting as a bridge for both plot (Paddington's efforts to make money) and character (the judge's ill feelings towards Paddington). It's shockingly good writing.

It's also, I think, one reason why the films are so beloved. Retaining individual episodes (with some changes, like the extent of damage Paddington does, especially in the first film's bathroom episode) while integrating them with the plot makes them flow without standing out while giving audiences recreations of things they love while also never feeling like they're just there for fan service. They're part of the stories.

Family


It's something of a joke to say that a movie is about family at this point, but, really, the Paddington films are all about family. In the first one, Paddington finds his adopted family, the Browns. In the second, it's about bridging the gap between his new family and his old family (Aunt Lucy) with the book all while his family learns the unappreciated importance he holds in their lives. In the third, it's about digging into Paddington's past and finding his true family (the second film established the Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuzo had found Paddington in the river near their home in the jungle).

However, that's not all. Remember that moment when you realized that the movie Aliens was about pitting two mothers against each other (Ripley and the Alien Queen), and you went, "Wow, this is really well written. I had no idea." Well, the Paddington films do something similar.

In the first film, the antagonist is Nicole Kidman's Millicent Clyde, the daughter of the British explorer who found Aunt Lucy and Uncle Pastuzo but did not bring a specimen back for stuffing. So, decades later, she wants to make up for her father's failings by stuffing Paddington. In the second film, it's Hugh Grant's Phoenix Buchanan, an actor in a long line of actors who has fallen on hard times (he stars in dog food commercials now) and wants to find the pop-up book in question which is actually a treasure map his grandfather tried to steal unsuccessfully which will help him back on his feet. In the third, it's Antonio Bandares' Hunter Cabot, the latest in a line of a cursed family looking for El Dorado who discovers that Paddington is the key to that discovery.

So, in all three films, Paddington is looking for family, and in all three films, his antagonist are looking to correct mistakes using their family past in some way. It's an interlacing of character motivations that point to a thematic point about the importance of family and one's place in it that is consistent across all three films. It's, again, solid writing.

Universality


I've touched on this, but I have to emphasize how these family movies really are...family movies. They are not children's movies. They are films that can be enjoyed from children to the more...cynically minded. It's the combination of the innocence of Paddington, his Pollyana-esque qualities on those around him, and the conventions of the films around them that appeal to more adult sensibilities regarding plot, pacing, and the basic conventions of setup and payoff. I've seen my fair share of children's movies where the only adult appeal is in-jokes that quickly wear out their welcome. Paddington and its sequels simply work as films on their own without being cloying.

I adore all three, finding the trio of adventures to be marvelous jaunts through London and the jungles of Darkest Peru with wonderful comedy (Brendan Gleeson is perfect as the hard-nosed convict who gets softened with the discovery of marmalade in the second one and Olivia Colman is hilarious in the third one as a singing, not at all suspicious, nun), and they have the tight story structure and storytelling one would expect from the best of thrillers and adventure films. They are not just prime entertainments that can entertain children, they are prime examples of their genres.

And that is why I recommend them to you now. If you have time for only one, make it Paddington 2, but the entire trilogy is a marvelous creation, filled with life, joy, and sheer entertainment value. These are absolutely endearing and delightful jaunts, and I highly recommend you discover them for yourselves.

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Ballerina

The Phoenician Scheme

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

Student Romance: Days of Youth (Rating 3/4) Full Review "So, it's nice, well-made, and overlong. It's really a very nice introduction to Ozu's body of work." [The Criterion Channel]

That Night's Wife (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's good, interesting, surprisingly moving, and...too long. But that's a relatively minor sin." [The Criterion Channel]

The Lady and the Beard (Rating 3/4) Full Review "The resolution is almost slight, another point towards the Lubitsch comparison, but it's nice. And that's the movie. Nice, amusing, a bit slight, but ultimately a handsomely produced, entertaining package with a hook for the title and the poster." [The Criterion Channel]

I Was Born, But... (Rating 3/4) Full Review "However, I really did kind of love that final act. It was kind of great. The kind of touching, sincere emotional effort that Ozu was showing he could do almost in his sleep." [The Criterion Channel]

Where Now are the Dreams of My Youth? (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "I think this is Ozu's best film up to this point. I still think he could tighten things up in his first hours, and I wish they were funnier than they are (they're funny, just not that funny), but the emotional catharsis of the end is complex and deeply satisfying." [The Criterion Channel]

Passing Fancy (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's quite solid storytelling, combining early comedy with later drama. I just wish the ending more fit the film." [The Criterion Channel]

A Story of Floating Weeds (Rating 4/4) Full Review "But still, this is the one film in the silent period that feels like Ozu's completely." [The Criterion Channel]

The Only Son (Rating 4/4) Full Review "This quiet reflection on life, its disappointments and hopes, is a marvelous achievement in film." [The Criterion Channel]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 6/28, and it will be about the last three eras of the Godzilla franchise.