The Magic Pudding

2000

Animation / Family / Musical

4
Rotten Tomatoes Critics - Rotten 58% · 1 reviews
Rotten Tomatoes Audience - Spilled 58% · 1K ratings
IMDb Rating 5.7/10 10 575 575

australia based on novel or book pudding

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

Karl Zwicky Photo
Karl Zwicky

Top cast

Sam Neill Photo
Sam Neill as Sam Sawnoff
Toni Collette Photo
Toni Collette as Meg Bluegum
Geoffrey Rush Photo
Geoffrey Rush as Bunyip Bluegum
Hugo Weaving Photo
Hugo Weaving as Bill Barnacle
720p.WEB
722.11 MB
1280*720
English 2.0
NR
Subtitles us  
23.976 fps
1 hr 18 min
Seeds 5

Movie Reviews

Reviewed by aplord

Oh dear.....

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.
Reviewed by barry-28 5 / 10

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.
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