Why Paddington 2 is My Favourite Film of the 2010s

Cinema is an art form. We usually engage with movies as nothing more than mindless entertainment. Movies can be mindless, but it all depends on how we choose to engage with them. In his book 'The Great Movies' legendary film critic Roger Ebert writes:

We live in a box of space and time. Movies are windows in its walls. They allow us to enter other minds, not simply in the sense of identifying with the characters, although that is an important part of it, but by seeing the world as another person sees it. François Truffaut said that for a director it was an inspiring sight to walk to the front of a movie theatre, turn around, and look back at the faces of the audience turned up to the light from the screen. If the film is any good, those faces reflect an out-of-the-body experience: the audience for a brief time is somewhere else, sometime else, concerned with lives that are not its own. Of all the arts, movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people.

That last sentence is key: "movies are the most powerful aid to empathy, and good ones make us into better people." When I began revisiting movies I loved from the past decade to try and pick a favourite, I decided to use that as my criteria. I wasn't just looking for a movie that entertained me or demonstrated a mastery of the craft of filmmaking. I wanted a movie that tangibly affected the way I live my life in a positive way. And when I thought about films from the past decade that achieved that, there were a few from the that came to mind but Paddington 2 clearly stood out above the rest.

If you've never seen the Paddington films it's easy to lump them in with the "CGI animal with live action humans" category along with bad movies like Yogi-Bear, Alvin and the Chipmunks, The Smurfs, G-Force, Garfield: The Movie.... but aside from being a family film that features a titular CGI talking animal, Paddington has almost nothing in common with those movies.

I was hesitant to pick this film as my favourite from the decade because we have enough sequels and movies based on books. I felt like I should pick an original film. In a market saturated with sequels, prequels, adaptations, remakes, reboots and very few original movies, I always thought the solution is to make more purely original movies. But a movie can be original and still be bad. The solution isn't purely original movies, it's good movies. There is nothing original about Paddington 2 at all. The plot line is familiar, it uses the tried and true formula for a family film. Paddington 2 isn't trying to surprise you or play a game of "gotcha". The film finds its charm in its simplicity.

But that doesn't make it Lazy, Paddington is never lazy. Every member of the brown family has their own specific arch that is paid off in the climax. Almost every detail in the first act is either a set up to a pay off, or a callback from the first movie. The film is set in a surreal-ized London, England. It's similar enough to be relatable but just different enough to be interesting, allow audiences to turn off their logical thinking minds. The film is able to get away with cartoonish elements that are delightfully ridiculous.

Another thing worth mentioning, this film understands the visual language of cinema better than almost any other movie. You could pause the movie at any point and any frame is a perfectly composed photograph.

Yes, the movie has its spectacle moments, in fact it's one of the most try hard movies I've ever seen. Its climax features a chase scene on top of a moving train as a nod to the original Mission: Impossible, but its spectacle is overshadowed by a heart-wrenching kindness. This little bear is here to challenge every audience member to be a better human, and in the world we live in today, that almost seems radical.

Let's face it: we live in a world that is very divided. We identify ourselves by who we voted for in the last election, and we fear people who think and act differently than us. It seems like everyone is mad about everything, all the time. Being a human being in the modern world is no easy thing, and it can be very soul-crushing sometimes. We're all trying to make sense of a world that makes no sense, and this movie is an absolute breath of fresh air. Ironically, it takes a bear to remind us what it means to be human. Paddington doesn't expect anybody to be perfect. But he is here to remind us that we all can do a little bit better. As Aunt Lucy said "if we are kind and polite, the world will be right".