MovieChat Forums > Paddington (2015) Discussion > What time period is the film set in?

What time period is the film set in?


I've seen pictures of Paddington Station as it looked in the 1950s,so will be set in that period or modern day?

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From what I gather, it will take place in the modern day, but with a sort of retro look. The train in the teaser trailer looks quite modern, but the station has been recreated to look as it did in the 50s.

I like this idea--it reinforces the "timelessness" of the Paddington stories.

(To say nothing of the fact that the real street named Windsor Gardens is nowhere near as nice as the Browns' neighborhood. Michael Bond's daughter has said that her father was definitely not basing the location on the real Windsor Gardens, but a sort of idealized version of the Notting Hill area. So setting it in a sort of "fantasy-modern" version of London makes sense.)

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The film is set in present day, and the Station hasn't been made to look "50's", thats just how it looks. But anyway, the station was built in 1854 and has looked the same every since so it's never looked 50's.

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Surely in 1854 it looked 50s?

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Yeah, 1850's 

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The phone number in the Brown's house has an 0207 London number, which came into effect in June 1999. Previously it was an 01 number which came into effect in 1959.
Most of the wallpaper and furniture are retro 50/60's. They also use corded telephones for all their calls, but didn't use any of the old dial telephones that were around in the 50/60's. The clothes everyone wears are period too. Although the young girl at the start seems to be wearing leggings. Nothing seemed to be very modern at all and more in line with the time Paddington came to London in 1958.

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Nothing seemed to be very modern at all and more in line with the time Paddington came to London in 19588


Some of it was quite archaic, yes, but remember that the girl was wearing a pair of what appeared to be Dr Dre (or very similar headphones). And there is the skateboard Paddington uses. And Mr Brown uses a laptop at one point. And the girl was using her computer to learn a foreign language. And in one scene the security camera guys are eating a pack of Oreos.

All in all, it was a mix of modernism with throwback to the original period the stories were set in.

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All in all, it was a mix of modernism with throwback to the original period the stories were set in.

I think that's right: it's essentially set in the present day, but with some deliberate throwbacks to reference the oringinal stories.
The fact that the elderly Mr Gruber (Jim Broadbent's character) came to London as a child via the Kindertransport implies that we're roughly in modern times, rather than - say - the 1950s.

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It's all over the place. The opening film of the explorer - which is meant to be the fairly recent past - is done in the style of the 1930s. Paddington station has old-looking signs but a modern train on the platform. The family don't use Oyster cards on the London Underground but the old-fashioned paper tickets instead, which have been steadily phased out since the early noughties. Everything's said in modern 21st century slang, but the family don't own a computer and use phone books to look up addresses. The one computer that is seen is a greenscreen text-based one from the 1980s.

There's also what's probably a deliberately anachronistic 'flashback' to the Brown parents when Judy was born, which although meant to take place just over a decade ago sees them in full 1960s/1970s clothing with Steppenwolf's 'Born To Be Wild' playing. As mentioned in other posts it's meant to be a bit of a mish-mash of various decades, primarily based in 2014 but with lots of elements from the 1950s etc included.

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The family don't use Oyster cards on the London Underground but the old-fashioned paper tickets instead, which have been steadily phased out since the early noughties.


I still exclusively use proper tickets. I don't trust them Oyster thingies.

And yeah, I think they deliberately made the film timeless, with references to every era since the books were published.

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I agree that the time period is "all over the place".

They used a computer which looked like one from the eighties, but they also used a modern looking laptop.

They can be seen talking on a cellphone, but they also had the phones with cords in several scenes.

The scene in which the mother is pregnant with her daughter does look like a late 1960s or early 1970s scene, which would mean that the daughter would be an adult in modern day times, rather than a teen.

I noticed that the kids weren't texting at all, which is odd for a story set in contemporary times.

I couldn't make heads or tails of the daughter's clothing. It kind of looked like they were trying to do a 1980s style, but it looked more contemporary than anything. Back then, the long t-shirts and sweaters covered part of the leggings. She had on a short top. The slouch socks looked like the ones we wore in the late eighties. Her hairdo looked fairly modern.

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Well Hugh Bonneville is 51. So he would have been 18 to 25 between 1979-1985 which would fit the mustached Bonneville motorcyle scene.

The daughter is 13 or 14. So she must have been born around 2001.

I think they just had to do that to accomodate Hugh's age in the film with two young kids.

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Considering the data base system the Guild used, couldn't they just googled the explorers name?

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Depends on the scene. One minute they're using laptops and cell phones, and next minute the father was a hippie while his wife was pregnant with their daughter (who is 13 or 14 in the movie).

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it is set i the present, but with some anachronisms. For instance, an ordinary family like the. Browns probably couldn't afford a house in Notting Hill nowadays, nor would they be very likely to have a full time housekeeper.

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She's not a paid housekeeper, though. I understood her as part of the family.

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The film is set in contemporary london... there were shots that included the London Eye, the cheesegrater, the walkey talkey, etc... so it is set within the last 5 years.

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