For a character so deeply entrenched in the memories of children of a certain age, the arrival of a Postman Pat movie wasn’t exactly met with the “Don’t sully our childhood” outrage that met certain other cartoon characters that recently got and will be getting the big screen treatment. Even though new episodes of his show continued to be produced up until 2008, he really was a milestone of the late 80’s / early 90’s, yet still you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who either really wanted this film to exist, or really wished nobody had bothered. Even after watching it, that opinion will remain just as apathetic.
Pat is a Postman (duh) in the small, sleepy village of Greendale, and his yearly bonus was going to be enough to take his wife Sara on a long-overdue honeymoon to Italy, but his new boss is making some heavy cut-backs to replace all the staff with robots. When a TV talent show You’re The One announces its top prize to be a trip to Italy (duh), Pat decides to enter and it turns out he’s got a great singing voice, so he’s whooshed off to the big city of London to become a big star, and the new face of Royal Mail in the process. But will all this fame and popularity change Pat from the intrinsically nice and thoughtful man that he really is?
Some quick insights into the movie that will potentially decide if you can endure it’s duration: the host of You’re The One is a snarky, rude man called Simon Cowbell; Ronan Keating (who provides the singing voice for Pat) turns up to play a character called Ronan who sings a Ronan Keating song and gets booted off the talent show; upon hearing the Postman Pat theme song, Postman Pat decides he doesn’t really like it.
To put it mildly, this film is random, with its anti-commercialism message sending mixed-messages with the Postman Pat Helicopter and Greendale Postal Centre sets looking exactly as they’ll do in local stores near you. Not to worry though, because the target audience of 5 year olds who have yet to be exposed to the greatness of Pixar will most likely remain suitably distracted for its 88 minute run-time, while accompanying parents will be left wondering what happened to THEIR Postman Pat.
