Sally Hawkins may be winning accolades for her performance in The Shape of Water, though I imagine her work in Paddington 2 (which is also currently playing in wide release) was no less challenging. In both films, Hawkins is called upon to convey an intimate, loving relationship with a nonhuman character and sustain the illusion that an imaginary creation exists in the real world. It’s even possible that the challenge of acting in Paddington 2 was greater than that of acting in Water: whereas the Amphibian Man of the later film was played by an actor in a costume—thereby giving Hawkins someone to act with and react to on set—the title character of Paddington 2 was created largely in post-production with digital effects. (There may have been an actor on set to fill in for Paddington, but I can assume that he looked nothing like the little bear that audiences know and love.) Hawkins and her costars not only sustain the illusion of making Paddington seem real, they make it look easy. In nearly every scene he’s in, the talking bear makes an emotional impact on the human characters around him, and the cast succeeds in making that impact relatable.
One sympathizes readily with Paddington, in part because he’s so willing to sympathize with others. The Paddington films preach a message of acceptance that’s no less straightforward than that of The Shape of Water, encouraging viewers to share in the hero’s tolerant worldview. Yet King and his collaborators deliver this message far more gracefully, I believe, than Guillermo del Toro and his collaborators do. Paddington 2 simply presents it as a given that prisoners can be reformed and that immigrants benefit British society—there’s never a sense of moralizing. That the cast is uniformly winning only adds to the spirit of bonhomie.
