With a November 2014 release date already on the horizon, it looks like Paddington Bear has finally found his voice for his feature debut.
StudioCanal has revealed that Colin Firth will be front and centre for the new live-action/CGI feature, with Firth set to lend his voice to the film, as well as donning motion capture to incorporate some of his facial expressions and mannerisms into the film.
Nicole Kidman, who stars opposite Firth in the upcoming awards contender The Railway Man, will take the female lead as the antagonist, a seductive taxidermist.
Hugh Bonneville and Sally Hawkins will star as Mr. and Mrs. Brown, with Julie Walters cast as their housekeeper, Mrs. Bird, and Jim Broadbent also set to take the part of antiques shop owner, Mr. Gruber.
Adapted from Michael Bond’s beloved books, PADDINGTON tells the story of a polite young bear from Peru with an endearing talent for comic chaos, who arrives in London in search of a home.
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 cook marmalade, listen to the BBC World Service, and dream of an exciting life in London. When an earthquake destroys their home, Aunt Lucy decides the time has come to smuggle her young nephew on board a boat bound for England, in search of a better life. Trusting of the kindness of strangers, she ties a label round his neck which simply reads ‘Please look after this bear. Thank you.’
Lost and alone at Paddington Station, Paddington soon finds that London is not the welcoming, well-mannered land of his dreams, but a rather busy, bustling metropolis where nobody even notices him. Luckily, he meets the Brown family who feel unable to abandon this homeless young bear to his fate. They name him after the station where they found him and offer him a place to stay while he searches for the only person he knows in London: the explorer who impressed Aunt Lucy years before.
But little do the Browns realize just how much comic mayhem one young bear will bring to their family life, and when this rarest of bears catches the eye of a sinister, seductive taxidermist, it isn’t long before his home – and very existence – is under threat…
Paul King (The Mighty Boosh) is directing from a script he co-wrote with Hamish McColl (Johnny English Reborn), with Emma Thompson also doing a recent rewrite.
David Heyman, producer behind the Harry Potter franchise, will be producing, and StudioCanal will be fully financing the film.
Speaking to the Daily Mail on the casting, Firth said,
Paddington will be computer generated, and I will speak his lines with, I suspect, a slight Peruvian flavour… Every other character in the film will be real, live, human beings… But the idea is that Paddington will have something of me in his DNA because I’m going to do some sessions wearing one of those helmets with cameras to capture my face muscles, and all that data will somehow be incorporated into Paddington.
Then they’ll use motion- capture equipment on someone more bear-size than me to do all the full body, bear stuff. I will do the table reading and rehearse with the other actors, but I won’t do the voice work until much later on — some time next year.
The Weinstein Company has now come on board to take on the North American distribution rights, and it will be the first film to be released under the TWC-Dimension banner.
Paddington will be released in the UK on 28th November, 2014, and is set to be released in the US in the first quarter of 2015.
