(*wakes up with crotch covered in orange marmalade, sees everyone looking at him*)
What? …Oh don’t you dare judge me, he looked so fluffy!
Now that I’ve composed myself, today brings us the trailer for The Weinstein Company’s Paddington, which made headlines earlier this year when Colin Firth dropped out as the voice of Paddington Bear in the middle of post-production. Voice work, of course, is the easiest work an actor can get, meaning either Paddington was so bad that the star of Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason didn’t want to be associated with it, or that Colin Firth has so much integrity that he wouldn’t take a job if he thought someone else could do it better. I’m leaning towards number two. Colin Firth just seems better than the rest of us.
Here’s the trailer, featuring new P-Bear Ben Whishaw (aka new Q, aka the bare butt guy in Cloud Atlas) and Downton Abbey‘s Hugh Bonneville. As Otto from A Fish Called Wanda might ask, “Why did they name him after a car?”
Adapted from Michael Bond’s beloved books, Paddington follows the comic misadventures of a polite young bear with an endearing talent for comic chaos.
Paddington has grown up deep in the Peruvian jungle with his Aunt Lucy who, inspired by a chance encounter with an English explorer, has raised her nephew to dream of an exciting life in London. When an earthquake destroys their home, Aunt Lucy decides to smuggle her young nephew on board a boat bound for England, in search of a better life. Arriving alone at Paddington Station, Paddington soon finds that city life is not all he had imagined – until he meets the kindly Brown family, who find him with a label tied around his neck which reads ‘Please look after this bear. Thank you.’ They offer him a temporary home whilst he searches for the explorer who impressed Aunt Lucy all those years before.
I like these CGI/live-action hybrid movies as little as the next guy, but I thought the cinematography here looked cool. That said, I didn’t grow up with Paddington Bear, so there may be a vocal group of British man-children screaming “Oi, ‘e’s buggerin’ me choild’ood, ‘e is!”
I guess we’ll find out. Paddington hits the UK November 28th, and the US January 16th.