When Paul King was the bearly known director behind the first Paddington film, he was so terrified of what Paddington’s creator, Michael Bond, would make of it that he couldn’t bear to sit and watch it with him. Instead — bear puns over — while the venerable Bond sat with the producers in a screening room in Soho three years ago, King paced around the block for a solid 90 minutes.
He was worried enough about what the rest of us would think of this mixture of live action and computer-animated talking bear. “Because there is that ‘national treasure’ thing,” he says, the morning after finishing the eagerly awaited sequel. “And because there is resistance to things like that being rebooted, for very understandable reasons.
