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Review
by Kozo: |
What's not to love about McDull? He's young, has a healthy
imagination, and is a cuddly pig with probably the IQ
of a turnip. He also has one hell of a mother, who raised
him alone and is so loving that she can even make a
trip to the Peak seem like a plane ride to the Maldives.
McDull was also the star of My Life as McDull,
a winning 2001 animated film that was supposed to be
for kids, but played pretty well to adults too. The
metaphor-heavy lesson of that film: try harder, make
do with what you got, and live life in Hong Kong to
the best of your ability—and within the limits
of your class and/or tax bracket.
McDull returns in McDull,
Prince de la Bun, but this time the tykes may get
left in the cold. This sequel again features heavy metaphorical
implications on urban life in Hong Kong. It's also much
more episodic, and ultimately makes far less sense than My Life as McDull ever did. The lack of overall
logic is probably a boon for the kiddies, since logic
has never been a heavy selling point for anything that
truly appeals to them (Teletubbies, anyone?). However,
the bittersweet emotions and Hong Kong-specific flavor
of Prince de la Bun would seem to make this film
much more skewed to adults than the original McDull.
What's more, the emotions work spectacularly. Prince
de la Bun may not make much sense, but anyone with
a feeling for life in Hong Kong should find something
to like here.
When the picture opens,
McDull is stuck in school learning the ins and outs
of modern urban life (how to order food, negotiate with
neighbors, and get along blithely in today's Hong Kong).
Meanwhile, Hong Kong is undergoing urban renewal, meaning
buildings are being torn down while McDull and his classmates
are getting taught the cha-cha by their mustached principal
(voiced by Anthony Wong). The principal's likeness is
also used for at least two waiters, a clueless doctor,
and various other local characters. The meaning behind
this: the principal is not a guy, but a type, and the
world of McDull is a thinly disguised metaphor for the
times in which we live. Viva existentialism!
Enter McDull's mother
(voiced by Sandra Ng), who's busy getting ready for
her demise by leasing a fab new burial plot. The visit
to the site of her future grave is an event which sends
McDull into sobs, and Mom tries to cheer up her porky
kid by telling him a fairy tale about the "Prince
de la Bun", a dimwitted pig who looks suspiciously
like McDull, but clearly is not. For one thing, the
Prince grows to adulthood, where he takes on the voice
of Andy Lau. For another thing, the Prince is clearly
someone else: McDull's dad, who was suspiciously absent
in the original McDull.
Lo and behold, Mom's tale—which
she muses could be turned into a novel and sold for
big bucks ala Harry Potter—is really a metaphor
for the disappearance of McDull's dad. Basically, he's
a prince who realizes at the final moment that he should
reclaim his crown, so he runs off and abandons all that
we ordinary folk hold dear: job, family, and an ordinary
life. It's a tale of an everyman's mid-life crisis,
and of the widely held notion that we're all special
people. Our belief in our own greatness is but a delusion
of grandeur, and as we face our mediocre futures, we
also attempt to grasp our [self-imagined] glorious pasts.
To read between Prince de la Bun's lines, we're
not all special; we just think we are. But if we managed
to father an imaginative little tyke like McDull, it
can't all be bad, can it?
To be blunt, who the Hell knows?
The story of McDull, Prince de la Bun seems pretty
straightforward, but the way in which its told could
leave even the most loose cinema reader scratching their
noggin. The whole doesn't make much sense; one could
view the fanciful story of the Prince de la Bun as a
Hong Kong working-class Don Quixote, complete
with a pizza-headed Sancho Panza and a spear-carrying
retainer—who, oddly enough, also looks like McDull's
Principal and is also voiced by Anthony Wong. Or, one
could just see the film in its most obvious interpretation:
the story of a little tyke and the stories that his
mom tells him. Or, one could view the whole film as
a random pastiche of barely connected references to
Hong Kong and the perils of modern living. Meanwhile,
a large robot is trying to destroy Hong Kong in the
name of urban renewal, and McDull can't solve his possibly
genetic leg-shaking problem. But hey, hopefully his
leg-shaking problem can be the key to a grand, promising
future—or so Mom hopes. Is anyone getting this?
Probably not, but if you're
looking for coherent animation, go watch a Disney movie. McDull, Prince de la Bun is not a Disney movie,
nor does it try to be. This tale of a little pig actually
has some pretty lofty messages hidden beneath its disconnected,
four-color exterior, and oddly enough...it works! Director
Toe Yuen manages to use sound and image to create soaring
moments of sublime, innately familiar emotion, and though
the effect is ultimately questionable, there is a real
sense of feeling beneath the barely-coherent world of
McDull. Hong Kong is rendered in an astoundingly detailed
three dimensions, and its given realistic, familiar,
and even magical life. McDull, Prince de la Bun does something very different and very worthy with its
four-color frivolity: it manages to reflect real life,
presenting it as ordinary, pathetic, ridiculous, special,
and magical—and it does it all at the same time!
Such a cinema feat is probably impossible in live-action,
and the fact that Toe Yuen and company were able to
do it with a dimwitted pig as their protagonist should
get them a heaping of praise. Again, this film really
makes next to no sense. Yet somehow, it really doesn't
have to. (Kozo 2005) |
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