The Toddler Dad Movie Revue: 'Paddington'

Which movies can I watch with my wiener kids that won't make me suicidal? An ongoing investigation.

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One part of being a dad that I never considered before I actually was one was how often I’d have to watch the same kids movies and kids shows. Partly I never pondered it because it wasn’t really a possibility when I was a kid. I vividly remember daydreaming about how cool it would be if I could have a magic remote control with a special button that made it play The Simpsons whenever I wanted. Lo and behold, we have that now. Corporations can alter those Simpsons episodes at their whim and pretend that they were always that way, but we have that now.

Yet what sounds mind-blowingly futuristic and cool to 8-year-old me also carries with it new dilemmas. Growing up as an only child in the 80s and 90s, I basically just watched what my parents watched. That was what you did then. The Simpsons, Married With Children, The Wonder Years, In Living Color, Parker Lewis Can’t Lose (when can we get this damned show on streaming??) — these were all pretty great shows, and I don’t think I’m being generationally biased when I say so. Of course, I also absolutely gorged on teenybopper dogshit like Saved By The Bell and The Real World whenever I could watch TV alone or somewhere that had cable (which wasn’t available out in the dirt road country where I lived).

I’m not trying to do a reverie here, just generally wondering how much of that actually-good TV I would’ve consumed had I been left to my own devices, and had thousands of options, many aimed specifically at dumb little kids, that I could call up at any time on any device. These days when I’m driving my son to daycare, he’lls scream “videos!” and half the time I’ll just hand over my phone to keep him from turning into a shrieking goblin. I know it’s probably not great parenting, but have you ever dealt with a shrieking goblin? It sucks. Sometimes he kicks me in the nuts.

When we’re at home it isn’t much different. The kid gets obsessed with a Pixar movie and we watch Moana 75 times in a row until he moves onto to Encanto, Zootopia, Ratatouille, Wreck-It Ralph, whatever. Those are all pretty solid, actually. It’s when he cries for Cocomelon or Mickey Mouse Clubhouse that I groan internally. While the theme songs have gotten better (Mickey Mouse Clubhouse has a They Might Be Giants theme song, Spidey and His Amazing Friends has the guy from Fallout Boy, and Paw Patrol has one that sounds a lot like Parry Gripp even though it isn’t), the shows are mostly still intolerable for adults. I rarely make it more than 90 seconds before I start checking my phone. Which sucks, because in my heart I still want to believe in the communal viewing experience.

And so I wondered, what alternative could I serve him that wouldn’t turn him into a goblin and me into caricature of a checked-out 21st century parent?

In my first shot at this, I settled on Paddington, a mix of live action and CGI bear hijinx that is, shockingly, 10 years old as of this writing. I’m envisioning this as an ongoing series.

The Toddler Dad Movie Revue

StudioCanal/Netflix

Movie: Paddington (2014)

Toddler Rating: 9/10

After some early whining for me to change it and put Mickey Mouse Clubhouse back on, he mostly settled in after the credits — partly thanks to my repeated promises that there would be a bear. The bear (a CGI creation voiced by Ben Whishaw) showed up early and often, which wasn’t a huge selling point when I watched it 10 years ago as a childless adult film critic, but was clearly a major deal-sweetener for a two-year-old. Pretty quickly he was staring mouth agape, with a single bead of drool rolling down his chin, which is as good a sign as any that he’s enjoying something (chip off the old block, clearly).

Likewise, one of the scenes I vividly remember disliking the first time I saw it, a sequence when Paddington sees toothbrushes for the first time, sticks them into his ears, and pulls out stinky, waxy goop that he proceeds to taste (too far, man!), absolutely crushed with the child. Ear wax tasting was a perfectly fired arrow directly to the center of the boy’s comedic wheelhouse. This is the same kid who demands to see the poop in his freshly-removed diapers, not surprisingly.

He ended up watching at least half or two-thirds of the movie before he started wanting to wrestle and play with balloons, far longer in real time than he ever actually pays attention to Cocomelon, Mickey Mouse Clubhouse, or Bluey (with Spidey and His Amazing Friends it might be a wash). He wanted to watch it again the next day, and shouted with glee during all of the bear hijinks. Feels like a big win.

Dad Rating: 9/10

I remember thinking there was way too much wacky bear shit the first time I saw it, but the squealing and pointing of your offspring tends to justify those moments. Aside from that, Paddington is legitimately funny, in a suitably dry, British way, with brilliant performances from Hugh Bonneville as Paddington’s adopted father, Henry Brown, and Sally Hawkins as his adopted mother, Mary Brown. Sally Hawkins is the closest female equivalent to “sexy in a weird way” more common to male actors like Willem Dafoe and Steve Buscemi.

Paddington delivers on a mix of humor for kids and humor for adults better than just about any movie I can think of (School of Rock?). While it doesn’t have the epic turns of Hugh Grant as the flamboyant actor villain or Brendan Gleeson as Knuckles McGinty like its sequel, it does have a wonderful turn from Nicole Kidman in one of her last roles before her face started looking strange. It’s also arguably the stronger articulation of the entire Paddington concept — that a goofy little bear could be an avatar for a nation’s national character, Britishness the way Britons would like to imagine it.

It makes me wish Americans had something like Paddington. The townsfolk can’t help but love Paddington no matter how much he screws up, because he’s such a polite little man about town. And the characters “win” when they embrace their natural dowdiness. “Personally, I enjoyed the Victorian wool experience!” Bonneville says in his first lines. “And we certainly learned a lot about wool!”

Why can’t we ever be that charmingly self-deprecating?

The production design is a sort of hyperreal eye candy, where every room of the Browns’ house is swathed in fantastical wallpaper and everyone dresses in artful layers of bright plaid, felts, and tweed. It’s fun to look at and compellingly tactile from scene to scene, evoking lovingly illustrated children’s books without overplaying the stylization or tipping into uncanny valley territory. Paddington is vivid and inviting where so many children’s movies like this are just garish.

I finally watched The Marvels the other night, which on the one hand isn’t quite the disaster everyone made it out to be when it was released (Eternals and Thor: Love and Thunder are worse) but also contains a textbook example of one my least favorite modern movie tropes: the “fanboy” character. Marvel in particular has taken to trying to justify their 30-some-movie-spanning interconnected narrative universe by treating the more major characters as famous people within that universe. How do they convey that fame? With lesser characters constantly fawning over them.

And so, teenage Kamala Khan is constant “fangirling” over Captain Marvel, the same way everyone fangirls and fanboys over the Avengers in Eternals, the same way Rose fangirls over the Star Wars people in The Last Jedi (a movie I will otherwise defend to the death, but would submit that this fanboy angle is a big part of the reason its most annoying haters hate it).

Not only do I not quite buy this behavior, it’s obnoxious to watch, almost like brands trying to flatter themselves. Do people really act like this around famous people? (In my experience, kind of sort of if you squint, but not really). Moreover, are we expected to enjoy it when they do? Have some god damned respect for yourselves. Show a little decorum. I’ve never had more respect for the British ideals of stiff upper lips and detached politeness than when people treat Paddington as just another fellow going about his business, deserving of respect but also privacy.

“Keep your eyes down, there's some sort of bear over there,” Bonneville delivers in their first meet. “Probably selling something.”

This attitude carries through both movies. Not being an obnoxious fanboy is not only not grating, it’s aspirational egalitarian. People are people, Paddington teaches us, even when they’re talking bears. I like that. A+ toddler movie, would watch 25-30 more times.