The Magic Pudding

This movie had all the right ingredients for a great children's film. Good actors well cast, a story that is a classic of Australian children's writing, and animation that brought the illustrations of the book faithfully and charmingly to life. Unfortunately, the film makers did not follow Norman Lindsay's story but made up one of their own, using characters and incidents from the original.

The new story doesn't work as well as it might have done, at least to me. Instead of a comic trio of pudding owners zealously protecting their property against a pair of incompetent (but often successful) thieves, we have them embarking on a quest for some lost parents and a struggle against the forces of nature and of tyranny. The seriousness of the new plot quite smothers the light hearted charm of the original.

That said, the movie is quite watchable, and my three children (ages 10, 7 and 3) all enjoyed it. I can't help wishing, though, that they'd followed the recipe.

I watched the first half hour of this thing on Showtime this morning before I switched off the TV. The best bits were the water colour backgrounds. Story was s***e. No direction. Lots of meaningless action. All wasted and futile. The people that made this need to go back and Learn the craft of Storytelling. Moral: Don't try and upgrade a classic.

Funniest bit: John Laws trying to act. Hilarious!

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.

You know a film is in trouble when a character in children's classic written early last century utters a line like " It'll destroy the very fabric of the universe!" That line - or something like it, gets a workout towards the end of this crude updating of the Australian Classic.

Of course, you won't have to wait until near the end to realise that this film is in trouble. The first few minutes will be all it takes.

Assemble a fine cast, spend millions and adapt the Australian Children's book that's in the same league as the "Wizard of Oz", "Wind in the Willows" or "Alice in Wonderland". A recipe for success you would think.

Instead this is a disaster.

Why? Because the makers simply didn't trust the strength of their material. Norman Lindsay wrote the book to prove that kids like hearing stories about food. It was a bet. Someone else had offered the opinion that what children wanted to hear about was "fairies and elves "."Nonsense," said Lindsay and wrote the Magic Pudding to prove it.

The Magic Pudding is loud, fast, broad, satirical and the book they invented the word "rambunctious" for.

The film is mild, meandering and with a moral about friendship and not being greedy. It comes with extra characters to give it cuteness, extra plot to give it relevance and extra gags "for the kids".

Sad sad sad. Read the book. Read the book aloud. Read it aloud to kids. Don't bother seeing this movie.

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.