The Magic Pudding
2000
Animation / Family / Musical

The Magic Pudding
2000
Animation / Family / Musical
Plot summary
Meet Albert, The Magic Pudding, Bunyip Bluegum, a splendid young koala and his seafaring friends Bill Barnacle and Sam Sawnoff. Together they fight off the bungled attempts of pudding thieves, Possum and Wombat, and try to solve the mystery of Bunyip's parents' disappearance.
Director
Top cast
Tech specs
720p.WEBMovie Reviews
Oh dear.....
All the right ingredients, but they didn't follow the recipe
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.