The Magic Pudding

A really cool animated adventure with a distinct style that's hard to verbalize. Not quite like the American or the British stuff. They're not imitating here; they really had a fresh story to tell and told it superbly.

Cute and funny, but very good at being more than a little disquieting, the rich Australain backdrop and talking Fauna are enchanting and atmospheric and each song is a delight.

As a French viewer with no knowledge about the original story, I would say this cartoon is like a UFO for a French audience. Both kids and parents were yawning after half an hour. As the movie was dubbed in French, the Australian accents were totally missed. The story upon which the movie is based is unknown to French viewers, so the movie just does not click. The baddie scared my nearly 4-year old, and I did not like the graphics very much. The various sequences in the movie just don't flow, you go from one character to another in what seemed totally random to me. I don't get the psychology of the cake either, but then I guess this won't prevent me from sleeping... I would be curious to read the original book, though. Anyway, I would not be paid to go see it again.

I have such vivid and fond memories of this movie. The first time I watched it, it was dubbed in Icelandic and I was six years old. It really stuck with me, it felt gritty and dark but also very entertaining for a kid. I still have the vhs I first saw it on.

Now, I'm 20 and decided to watch it again, this time in English since I couldn't find it in Icelandic online and nobody owns a vhs player nowadays. Oh my lord the memories came flooding back, it was almost overwhelming. I still absolutely loved everything about it, but I might be biased.

I really had high hopes for this film. Twelve million dollar budget, digitalanimation, star-packed cast (John Cleese, Sam Neill, Geoffrey Rush, Hugo Weaving, Toni Collette, Jack Thompson), fond memories of the Norman Lindsay story and the promise that it was going to mark a new direction in Australian mainstream animation.

Well, five minutes in and I was ready to leave. Most of the audience (packed to capacity with kids and adults) looked fidgety and bored. It's hard to remember a film that fails so comprehensively.

Looking forward to state-of-the art digital animation? Well you will have to be content with shoddy eighties-style Yoram Gross animation with a few digital lens flares. Yes, washed out watercolour backgrounds and sub-Disney style characters with bad inbetweening are back! Oh yes, and atrocious lip-syncing. At several points, Bill Barnacle's mouth doesn't even move when he talks!

Want a good story? Well this confusingly paced film had most of the kids restless and scratching their heads as they tried to figure out what was going on. For adults and fans of the Lindsay original, it manages to tick-off the original in plot points and scenes without any of the warmth or character of the original. It also introduces new elements such as Bluegum's lost parents that please no one. It reminded me of the old Rankin Bass "animated classics"; exciting stories leeched of their quirkyness and originality through a pedestrian TV-style telling.

Great voice acting and dialogue? Well if you can get past John Laws as Bumpus, the voice acting is okay. The dialogue however is awful. Poor old John Cleese is left to seemingly improvise old Fawlty Towers/Monty Python material while Geoffrey Rush utters some insipid stuff as Bunyip Bluegum. And yes, I know it's a kids movie!

Top musical numbers? Well the musical numbers pop up at unexpected moments but are mercifully brief. Most of them are passable eighties fare with the exception of one sickly-sweet Celine Dion power ballad by Bluegum's mum. In a week, I will have forgotten how they sounded.

The rest? Well did I mention the Saturday morning cartoon gags complete with musical "stings" or the TV-style direction (no swooping digital camera techniques here). Think of the The Silver Brumby and you'd be close..

This is not a clever movie. This is a dumb TV cartoon writ large. It shows no love for Lindsay nor any understanding of what a modern kids movie should be.

When his ship sinks off the South Pole, Bill Barnacle and his crew are starving when they discover some sort of magic pudding called Albert that can talk, change flavour on request, lasts forever and demands that they continue to eat him. The crew are divided over the pudding but two of them resolve to protect and look after it. Sometime later, far from this, small koala Bunyip Bluegum discovers that he is not an orphan and sets out to find them. Their paths cross on the road when Bunyip stumbles into the middle of an attempt by thieves to steal the everlasting pudding from Bill and his first mate Sam.

When I go to the US I always take the opportunity to watch the Cartoon Network late at night because it turns into adult swim and features some weird animations, one of which involves a team of fast food superheroes of a floating milkshake, a packet of fries and a rolling meatball; this is just one example and from the description you know it will not be a simple affair. And so it was with the Magic Pudding. I knew it was a kids film but having read the plot summary I wondered what this would be like because it sounded like the ramblings of a man on drugs. Certainly I did wonder who had been smoking what and where I could buy some when I watched the film's revelations that the pudding was present at Jesus's birth, was the cause of the mutiny on the Bounty and helped build the pyramids before going down on the Titanic and being frozen in ice (albeit half a world away from where Bill, Sam and Buncle find him). At times the novelty value of the ideas makes this entertaining but mostly it fails to translate this into the film as a whole and the film could easily settle in with any American cartoon with weird characters and celebrity voices. The songs are pretty uninspiring and I would have preferred the film without many of them and something more imaginative in their place.

It is still OK even if it is nothing special and it will keep young children distracting. There is the occasional amusing moment for adults but more could have been made of the unusual characters and story to serve both markets. The voices help. Cleese is quite good but I felt his character was a bit too abrasive and one-note. Weaving and Neill are OK in the leads while Rush is quietly understated as Bunyip. Despite the quality of the names, none of them really have much to work with even if they are OK for what it is. The support cast are OK but nobody really stands out mainly because this is not a film that seems able to stand out.

Overall the idea sounds like a weirdly imaginative kids movie that intrigued me. However aside from the pudding the film does little with it other than churn out a typically manic and heart warming adventure without too much in the way of originality in the writing. Distracting for children but nothing that special; hard not to see it as a missed opportunity though.