Giving birth in inauspicious circumstances, McBing names her son McDull. The piglet grows up with a humble nature to match his humble name. When McDull is taken ill, his mother rashly promises to take him to the Maldives. Unable to afford the trip, she engineers a journey to the Hong Kong hinterland, where some carefully placed fake signs convince her gullible son that they really have flown to the Indian Ocean. On their vacation, McBing is inspired by a news report of a successful Olympic athlete and she encourages McDull to take up a sport. The piglet soon begins training in the traditional Hong Kong sport of bun-snatching...
MY LIFE AS MCDULL is based on McMug, a 1991 comic strip by Brian Tse and Alice Mak. Tse was a Hong Kong writer who discovered the works of British illustrator Raymond Briggs while studying in Sydney. Mak was the artist who transformed Tse's work into a simplified art style redolent of Hello Kitty. Naturally, merchandising spin-offs soon beckoned, and the McMug menagerie soon got their own magazine Yellow Bus, as well as the first animated TV series to be commissioned, produced and broadcast as a solely Hong Kong production.
This movie spin-off continues the spirit of director Yuen's TV series, with a dizzying array of techniques jostling for attention, including 2D cel animation, pencil-work, paper-cuts, fully-rendered CG, and even unadulterated live-action. Despite its claims to be a wholly Cantonese production, it remains tempting to draw parallels with several foreign works. In particular, the loosely linked vignettes and washed-out colours strongly resemble Takahata Isao's MY NEIGHBORS THE YAMADAS. Designed for an audience with the attention span, linguistic ability and love of repetition of the very young, the script nevertheless conceals many in-jokes for the parents in the audience.
Jonathan Clements