My Life as McDull

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Actors: Anthony Wong Chau-Sang , Jan Lamb , Sandra Ng Kwan Yue

Director: Toe Yuen

IMDB Rate: 7.6 out of 10 (488 votes)

Plot Summary:Surprise winner of the FIPRESCI prize at the 26th Hong Kong International Film Festival (2002). Based on characters from a successful series of comic books by co-creators Alice Mak and Brian Tse, the film is told in voice-over by the mature McDull, a piglet in a world populated by both cute animals and humans. The narrative is constructed from several intertitled set pieces involving McDulls birth, education, and training as would-be Olympian, with excursions to his mothers TV cooking show, the Maldives, and other bits of whimsy. Musical accompaniment is provided by a series of adorably jovial nonsense songs set to ruminatively elegiac classical piano pieces by Schubert and Schumann. The photo-realistically animated cityscapes, saturated with remarkable detail, are dazzling. Whats beautiful in the film, is the depth of creativity the filmmakers joyfully deploy in the play of different kinds of images. As the adult McDulls perspective begins to dominate the narrative, the animation gives way to live action. McDull isnt a piglet at all, but a normal, if somewhat intellectually limited, little boy, whose typically ambitious mother pushes him into fabricating a dream world as compensation for her relentless pressure for success. He uses this world to exercise his own creativity in comfort, but ends up disgruntled by what he terms, in a striking closing monologue, this sordid world, this is not so dreamy, not so funny a world. Thankfully, the film doesnt leave him alone facing disillusionment. Moving from fantasy to reality, from a childhood saturated with freely self-deceiving invention to sober self-recognition, McDulls life is, by extension, Hong Kongs. The film, however, proposes that the task of maturity is to start anew, and to use disappointment as a springboard to a fresh beginning. (Excerpts from the review by Shelly Kraicer). The movie is in Chinese, with optional English or Chinese subtitles.