Paddington (2014)

Paddington arrives from darkest Peru with a suitcase, a hat, and a marmalade habit, and the Brown family of Windsor Gardens takes him in. Paul King's adaptation is a warm, well-mannered piece of work, and it has been received as such for a decade. The question before us is not whether it charms. It charms. The question is what it believes, and how loudly it says so.

The film's social consciousness is present but kept on a short leash. The casting is overwhelmingly white and British, with whatever diversity the production requires supplied by a computer-generated bear and an antique dealer whose backstory as a 1938 refugee was invented for the screen. Mr Gruber's history, the Windrush-era calypso on the soundtrack, the recurring suspicion that a stranger at Paddington Station might not belong: these amount to a genuine parable about immigration and xenophobia. It is a gentle parable, though. Critics reached for the word themselves. Nothing here preaches. The tolerance arrives through slapstick involving a bathroom flood and a man in a cleaning lady's dress.

Elsewhere the ledger is bare. There is no environmental concern, no critique of wealth or class, no interest in body image, neurodivergence, or romance of any orientation. Mary Brown is the open-hearted counterweight to her cautious husband, and the villain is a taxidermist with a grudge, but no thesis about women emerges from either. The Browns are comfortable, middle-class, and presented without irony. A taxidermist wanting to stuff and display an outsider is a fine image, and the film declines to push it. This is, finally, a children's film that means well, says little, and says it sweetly. The bear is delightful. The subtext is doing light lifting.