Paddington **** (2014, Hugh Bonneville, Sally Hawkins, Julie Walters, Nicole Kidman) – Movie Review

Michael Bond‘s beloved talking bear Paddington finds his right voice in Ben Whishaw and his right adoptive parents in Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins.

They play the kindly middle-class parents Mr and Mrs Brown, who discover the talking bear at the London train station and read the label around his neck (‘Please look after this bear. Thank you.’). They name him Paddington because they find his bear name unbearable to say, and reluctantly agree to take him in for just one night till he can find a proper home.

Hopefully that would be with the English explorer who went to his habitat in Peru and offered him a home any time he came to London. But first bear and Browns would have to find the explorer – and Paddington doesn’t even have his name.

A live-action feature based on Bond’s series of popular children’s books, the movie is sweet, charming, amusing – and totally retro old-fashioned, which was the only route to go. With lots of droll dialogue to chew over, Whishaw proves the perfect vocal artist for Paddington, replacing an apparently too-old sounding Colin Firth in a move that would have been better done in private.

Bonneville and Hawkins are enormously good in the star roles, game for a laugh throughout, with Bonneville even doing a funny if rather scary Mrs Doubtfire-style turn in drag at one point.

Julie Walters slices the tasty ham as the family’s housekeeper Mrs Bird (who may, or may not be Scottish, but I’m not sure about her accent). And there’s more ham from Jim Broadbent as the friendly antique dealer Mr Gruber, Peter Capaldi as the Browns’ nosy neighbour Mr Curry, and Matt Lucas as an obnoxious London taxi driver.

And Nicole Kidman camps it up too as the arch-villainess (and I mean arch) Millicent, a museum taxidermist who is planning to stuff Paddington right royally in a daft but entirely serviceable revenge plot. Kidman has been playing these wicked ladies for 20 years now, and she seems to relish it.

Samuel Joslin as the Browns’ son, the young English boy who befriends Paddington, is good and so is Madeleine Harris as his sister Judy. Michael Gambon and Imelda Staunton are briefly the voices of Uncle Pastuzo and Aunt Lucy. All the performances are pitched just right, and director Paul King’s screenplay gets the tone and mood and sense of humour just right, too.

Looking great, with a superb production and seamless visual effects (by Britain’s clever Framestore CFC), Paddington is enchanting in his first cinema appearance that leaves you begging for more. So good are the effects, that you are never quite sure if Paddington is CGI or a man in a bear suit.

And that’s it. If there’s no sequel, I’ll eat my floppy hat and several pots of really sweet and sticky marmalade.