Leave it to the British to take the already awful string of family films featuring live action and CGI characters and take it to a creepily disturbing level. The beloved children’s book series featuring Paddington Bear are coming to life and here is the trailer to prove it. Featuring an amazing cast who apparently all needed the money, PADDINGTON looks like the stuff nightmares are made of.
If you aren’t familiar with the over twenty Paddington Bear books, they are similar in many ways to Curious George in that they are both animals who get into trouble that inevitably involves their human counterparts. While Curious George is treated as an animal, Paddington is more anthropomorphized and can speak in proper English. Here’s the film’s synopsis which follows closely to the first book by author Michael Bond.
A young Peruvian bear with a passion for all things British travels to London in search of a home. Finding himself lost and alone at Paddington Station, he begins to realize that city life is not all he had imagined – until he meets the kindly Brown family, who read the label around his neck (‘Please look after this bear. Thank you.’) and offer him a temporary haven. It looks as though his luck has changed until this rarest of bears catches the eye of a museum taxidermist…
For such a classic series, PADDINGTON looks pretty standard. The animation doesn’t look much better than what we have seen in the SCOOBY DOO or SMURFS films and while the acting talent is much better, they don’t seem to be trying very hard here. It is a damn shame when you get this result from a cast that features Sally Hawkins, Colin Firth, Nicole Kidman aJulie Walters, Jim Broadbent, and Peter Capaldi.
PADDINGTON opens in theaters on December 25th.
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