Review : Paddington

PADDINGTON : A young English boy befriends a talking bear he finds at a London train station. A live-action feature film based on the series of popular children's books by Michael Bond.

I love Paddington. I will put that forward as a bold statement when I talk  about the film, I do love Paddington. I loved the books growing up as a child, and so to bring the books from paper to screen, and to have such a good cast of actors involved in it. The temptation to see this was too great, it was treat. I watched a trailer for it and just thought 'this looks delightful, I really fancy seeing this'. What a joy it was to view it.

For a cinematic experience, Paddington is nothing extraordinary or special, but what it is is a film which unites families as they watch it on the big screen and get caught in the adventure behind it, how a bear who is brought to London to cause accidents becomes involved in a family and a new life. he's sleeping in the attic of the Brown's house. Mr Brown (Hugh Bonneville) who isn't so kean on having a bear in the house is very neglectant to having Paddington around, a bear from darkest Puru who likes to eat Marmalade sandwiches.

Millicent wants to kill and stuff the bear, because a long time a go, her father Montgomery Clyde went to darkest Puru as part of an expeditionary trip for the geographer's guild to look into this group of bears and he didn't bring back a specimen because he thought it would be inhuman to bring back a specimen with him, so his membership gets revoked and he opens up a petting zoo and since then his daughter vows revenge and hence fourth wishes to capture the bear, kill him and stuff him and put him on display at the museum.

For a family film, its really funny. I always find that good jokes and light humour go a long way when your doing a new film on such a big scale which is meant to appeal to a universal audience. The challenge behind it is wanting to create a story which attracts the attention of the audience and keeping them interested throughout, and light-heartedness and comedy seems to be the best way of going about it I think, it's your safest bet, and Paddington gets unto some extraordinary adventures in London, and causes accidents, cataphoric accidents though quite unintentionally, he is a good bear but can't help but run into trouble.

Ben Wishaw as Paddington is absolutely adorable. Wishaw provides a distinctive quality to our loveable bear, he's polite, he's charming, he's charismatic and above all he is entertaining. As a title character, it makes a lot of sense that Paddington is entertaining, and he is. More so than another character in the film.

Keeping it short, I really like this film. The story wasn't difficult to understand at all, very simplistic plot with some mystery as to why the mysterious explorer could not be found. Only to later realise the reason that happened was due to the explorer being rejected by the comity for putting sensitivity towards the bears ahead of his family. It all runs full circle and makes sense and in time you do love 'Paddington' by the end, and he becomes 'A Brown'. 7/10!

NEXT: Narnia : The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe.