Rating: 3/5
Anti-Criterion Challenge 2024 | 42/52 | A titular character
We open with a black-and-white documentary about Darkest Peru, where a British explorer discovers a new bear species. He intends to kill it to have a specimen for the British Museum, but one bear stops him and saves him from a scorpion. So, as is the British tradition, he introduces the bears to the most advanced technology, from telescopes to marmalade. To his surprise, the bears are capable of human speech. He names the bears after people he knows, Pastuzo and Lucy.
Years pass, and Pastuzo and Lucy care for their orphaned nephew. The nephew forages oranges and introduces them to an industrial assembly line to produce marmalade. Pastuzo and Lucy dream of traveling to London to visit their British explorer friend—after all, he is the one who civilized these creatures. An earthquake sends the bears running to their shelter. Pastuzo does not make it, and the nephew finds Pastuzo’s hat, assuming he has died.
So Lucy stows the nephew away on a boat to London while she moves into the Home for Retired Bears. “They will not have forgotten how to treat a stranger,” says Lucy. From the boat, he jumps on a mail truck and arrives at Paddington Station. The sea of white Londoners, quite accustomed to ignoring immigrants and minorities, pass by the nephew without a second thought. The Brown family leaves a train. Henry, the father, sees the nephew and encourages the kids to keep their eyes down and ignore him. But Mary, the mother, finds the nephew’s exoticism charming. Finding his birth name too difficult to pronounce, they name him Paddington after the station.
The film follows Paddington and the Browns as the Browns learn to love Paddington and help him navigate a London that distrusts migrants of all species.
The film has good intentions in its exploration of British colonialism. We are supposed to see Paddington arriving “as he is,” and the lesson for Londoners to accept him rather than send him back where he came from, as is the current majority mindset. But in this story, Britain has already assimilated Paddington’s family. They speak English and are aware of British technology and idioms. They’ve even adopted industrialization. When Paddington arrives in London, he shows an earnest politeness and deference to authority—all classically “British” traits.
Yes, this helps clarify the point: if all that is different about Paddington is that he is a bear, then why all the distrust? But when the story paints Paddington as “one of the good ones,” the analogy only gets so far.
The film is cute and more thoughtful than most children’s movies in how it approaches its subject. Some of the jokes made me chuckle. But the whiteness on screen and in the filmmaking crew only highlights how little progress Britain has made post-colonialism.