McDull Sets Out to Save the World With a Robot — a New Assignment for Him and for His Creator, Alice Mak

Guess how McDull ends up saving the world. (Spoilers ahead.)

McDull: Rise of the Rice Cooker was 90% finished when Alice Mak phoned the animator Wong Ping: "Help!" She could not crack the outer-space scenes in this McDull film. The outer space she drew never looked right.

Until now, the farthest McDull had ever travelled was probably the Wudang Mountains. He was born in a small flat in Tai Kok Tsui, Kowloon, where he lives with his mother, eats at cha chaan teng diners, now and then dreams of the Maldives, and has a girl friend named May he would like to twist his way to New Zealand with. In drawing style and in story, it has always been the tale of a Hong Kong nobody. In this installment, McDull has to defend the Earth and stop a green, furry monster from outer space.

Mak was worried the moment she got the script. She has drawn the "McDull" comic strip for Ming Pao Weekly since 1991. The first McDull feature came out in 2001, and she has done the artwork for seven McDull films since, always slipping inside the character and getting him exactly right — the warmth between him and his mother, the way he hides nothing from May, from Miss Chan and from the headmaster, the way he keeps failing, and his sense of what in the world changes and what never does, like that ten-thousand-year clock with its built-in dialectic.

In the words of her husband Brian Tse, who writes and directs the McDull films, this is a story about "how a person can avoid twisting himself out of shape while still facing a fairly twisted world."

In this installment, though, "the world" turns up wearing the face of all humanity. McDull and the headmaster fly off to the United States to build a robot that can fight the monster.

Mak does not understand either what it is McDull holds on to. Her guess is that the story came out this way because her husband, like every boy, wanted to make a monster-fighting film. She is clear on one thing, though: unlike a superhero movie, a McDull story has no villain in it.

She drew the monster's "poop" pink.

This is the seventh film in the series, and like McDull, Kung Fu Kindergarten, McDull: The Pork of Music and McDull: Me & My Mum, it is a mainland–Hong Kong co-production. At a press conference a week before the release, the producer, Xinhua Zhanwang, said it expected box-office takings above 300 million yuan. That is far above the 70.58 million yuan record held by earlier McDull co-productions, let alone the 14.55 million yuan the first film, My Life as McDull, took in its home market of Hong Kong.

The film was first set for the summer season, opening July 22, then moved to the Mid-Autumn Festival. Over the summer it was sold against superhero movies, with bright, boisterous posters. For the later slot the pitch changed: now it was warm, wholesome family viewing.

Either pitch is supposed to be money in the bank. The producer also put out two promotional songs on the mainland: Pork Soup for the Soul — Invincible Edition (《心灵猪汤·无敌版》), sung by Pan Binlong, and Pork Soup for the Soul — Innocence Edition (《心灵猪汤·童真版》), sung by Selina.

The film opened on September 15 and took 4.95 million yuan on its first day. By the small hours of September 17 it had passed 14 million. That is not a good result.

A Douban reviewer writing as Europa thinks McDull has "flown too high," and he speaks for the part of the audience that cannot make sense of this film: "After wringing out all that motherly love, McDull spends ages away from that little island, that neighbourhood, that school — he's flown too high. The most speechless, most awkward part is that McDull turns out to be talented, successful, and loved!"

On Douban the film scores 6.4. Of the 979 people who rated it, 47.3% gave four or five stars, overwhelmingly more than gave one or two. But another 39.9% gave three.

It is not only mainland media and mainland opinion saying this. The Hong Kong press has written that McDull: Rise of the Rice Cooker has drifted away from its Hong Kong character, and that the result is awkward.

Mak spoke to QDaily after a preview screening on September 7. She explained how McDull ended up fighting monsters, why the film teases Superman, and why there is always a fierce girl at McDull's side.

She also pointed out that many people take McDull to stand for the Hong Kong spirit, and she has never seen him that way — even though a few glances are enough to recognise the cramped housing blocks of Tai Kok Tsui, the plants that grow only in Hong Kong and the little fishing village that looks so much like one of the outlying islands, and even though 90% of a McDull film is still made by Hong Kong people.

Other things Mak let slip suggest that the change was not McDull's alone: making McDull: Rise of the Rice Cooker was a new production experience for Brian Tse, for Mak and for their team. As the McDull story has grown, the people telling it have genuinely changed. Mak found she could not push past her own limits, so she decided to bring in help from outside.

She asked an independent Hong Kong animation director to do the film's outer-space scenes. Mak knew Wong Ping's colours were odd — vivid and jolting. He took the job and finished it in two weeks. The Hong Kong comics artist Yeung Hok Tak came back on board as well, drawing the village's strange grown-ups: Brother Long the loan shark, Sister Shrimp and the rest.

This is the part Mak cannot do, and she has been asking Yeung Hok Tak for help since McDull: The Pork of Music. The film needed small-time thugs who look genuinely nasty, and the ones she draws never have any menace in them. Here she took the children of the fishing village instead, which suits her better.

Against all that jolting imagery, Tse and Mak still held on to the warmth that runs through the whole McDull story. So: guess how McDull ends up saving the world.

The robot he builds, Rice Cooker, tickles the monster, and it knows what the monster likes to eat. In the end the monster gives up on attacking the Earth and goes home to outer space with the big rice cooker.

Q: QDaily

M: Alice Mak

Q: Some people come out of Rise of the Rice Cooker feeling that once McDull leaves his island, turns into a hero and succeeds in the conventional sense, he stops being McDull.

M: Really? I think if McDull hadn't fought properly, they'd be saying they only wanted him to fight properly and get famous. Now that he really can't turn into a hero, they're worried about that. No — to me McDull has always been right. I've put myself inside Mrs. Mak, his mother. Is McDull really stupid? He isn't stupid; he's thinking about other possibilities. The monster comes to invade the Earth and everyone is working out how to beat it, or how to make it say sorry. McDull doesn't think that way. All he cares about is the trouble back at the monster's home — whether it came to Earth because it needed something, and whether he can meet that need and make its life a bit better.

Q: Why make a monster-fighting film?

M: Because Brian Tse always wants to do something different. I think every boy hopes to make one monster film, or a wuxia film, or a romance — sooner or later you do one or two of those. I think Brian Tse handed McDull the biggest difficulty yet. Before it was the Wudang Mountains, the trouble with his mother, the singing; this time every difficulty in the world lands on him, and how does he face that?

Q: Does the way mainland money comes in affect the choice of subject?

M: I've never met them. When Brian Tse writes a script he never knows about any of that. He just writes the story.

Q: You've said before that McDull stories have no villains, and yet the earlier ones did have small-time thugs and so on. Is the antagonist this time a far more absolute one?

M: Who's the villain this time?

Q: The way I read it, the strongest robot in the competition.

M: Oh. But it turns good later — it rescues the big rice cooker out in space. So I can't find a villain. I still think they're all good. Everyone decides the monster is the bad guy, so it has to be beaten and made to say sorry. But it's only doing what it's meant to do. It isn't a villain either.

Q: McDull has grown up. Did you deliberately design a change in his character?

M: His basic character is simple, innocent, kind — and this time I think kindness is the point. I remember Brian Tse saying that kindness is the most powerful weapon.

Q: In this one, McDull is in primary school.

M: Whenever he runs into a difficulty, he turns out to be the right age for it. This time he has to make inventions, so he knows a bit more. For me it was a surprise. I'd never seen what he looks like in primary school, and for his temperament it was all new.

Q: New in what way?

M: I think the audience finds him much the same; I find him very different. In this film his skin is a bit darker, and the other children, his classmates, are no longer the little animals from before. They're real children, all tanned dark. And while we worked: ah, he's older now — shouldn't his voice be bigger too? Shouldn't his mother look at him differently?

Q: In the last film, the one about McDull and his mother, wasn't he already in his teens?

M: Yes, and sometimes he's older still, with a girlfriend. In that one he was a detective, a man from ancient times, an inventor. So he has grown up before, but who he is once he's grown, who his girlfriend is — it's different every time.

Q: So each McDull film exists in its own time and place, with no continuity?

M: Right. It depends when he's living. Say the 1960s: he might have long hair. Sometimes he's a kid running around a fishing village, so he's got no socks on, that wild-child look.

Q: McDull's girlfriend used to be May, a cow; now it's a pig, the same species as him. Was that deliberate? Though I'm not sure she counts as his girlfriend.

M: Girlfriends, in kindergarten? There's always a very fierce girl next to him. April is a wild boar; she has a tusk. But we wanted her to be lovable too, not really a shrew.

Q: Why does she have to be fierce?

M: I think you have someone like that in your life too — someone you feel you can be a bit fierce with. You're not that fierce with other people, but with this one you always end up a little fierce. McDull is that kind of character. You find him kind, so you get closer to him, so you're fiercer with him — and inside the fierceness you love him, you fret over him, you worry other people will bully him.

Q: Why so much 3D animation?

M: There was 3D before, but this time it's almost all of it. First, the pace demands it: the monster moves fast, there's fighting, it can't amble along the way McDull used to. And the sensory kick — you can't handle a monster fight flatly. We've also got to know quite a few 3D people in Hong Kong, and they designed a lot for us: the robot, the monster, the backgrounds. We look at what talent there is in Hong Kong, then get together and work out what would be good to make.

Q: So everyone doing the animation is from Hong Kong.

M: A small part of the backgrounds and the animation had help from the mainland, but most of it, 90%, was done in Hong Kong.

Q: Which parts did you draw yourself?

M: Fewer than usual this time. We brought in Wong Ping, and the outer-space backgrounds are his. Yeung Hok Tak did the thugs and the smaller figures in the village; I did the children and he did all the adults, Brother Long, Sister Shrimp. His work has a particular life to it — Hong Kong's underside.

Q: How many people worked on this one? McDull: The Pork of Music had more than a hundred.

M: Oh, did it? People keep joining, honestly. Once you're at a certain stage, if someone sings well you invite them in. The numbers keep growing, so you can't count. Wong Ping, for instance, came to help when it was nine-tenths done.

Q: Why did you think of him at that point?

M: Because I couldn't crack it. The outer space still wasn't strange enough. Wong Ping's colours are marvellous, very outer-space — not real outer space; the colours are so bright, so jolting.

Q: Whose idea was the "SORRY" gag?

M: Brian Tse's, of course. Very over-the-top comedy. To me it's just an ordinary joke, nothing of great significance.

Q: Why tease Superman?

M: The genre calls for it. And we grew up on Ultraman, the Masked Rider, "Salted Egg Superman."

Q: How did you come up with the monster's walk?

M: The credit goes to the 3D company. We kept insisting that every monster and every robot move in its own way. I'd also bought some superhero toys from the '60s and '70s, and they walk just like that: hit a wall and spin around. McDull's inventions are never very high-tech.

Q: Is one film every two years a rhythm you keep on purpose?

M: One film every two years is exhausting. Give us more time and I think we could do it better. Animation is a marvellous thing. Our company isn't big, a dozen or twenty people, and we can keep improving the same story, building it up. People who make animation are marvellous: they say nothing at all for two years so the audience can digest it in 90 minutes. It sounds like a terrible bargain, but that's where the romance is. You strain to tell someone a good story and hope they watch it with their heart.

Q: Why three months short? Who was rushing the schedule?

(The publicist cuts in.)

Q: Did anyone consult you about the "Pork Soup for the Soul" songs?

M: We didn't make them, so I've heard them once, not clearly enough. I won't comment.

Q: Was there a separate promotional song in Hong Kong?

M: Yes. Liu Xiaohua is his stage name; his real name is Liu Haonan. He's sweet, he sings on a natural high. His mother plays in a band too, and she taught him to sing very gently. In the end we talked him into singing it happily. Why not keep control of that part… (the publicist cuts in)

Q: Do the changes in Hong Kong still unsettle you?

M: They did a few years ago. I'm used to it now.

Q: Did you put jokes in specifically for adults?

M: Did we? Which ones?

Q: The monster's design, the way people interact with it, that sort of thing.

M: This one is a bit different — we call it a genre film. At the start you see a monster and a superman and you think you've seen this kind of film before. You don't expect any tenderness, so you assume McDull will naturally go and rough the monster up and beat it. That's what a genre film does here: it walks you into the trap, then lets you find out it isn't like that at all.

I didn't answer the adult question, did I? Let me get Brian Tse to answer it. (Tse: Adult jokes? Not really, I'm not sure which ones. People joke around sometimes, and it just went in.)

Q: Are you more like McDull or more like Mrs. Mak?

M: Both. In the worrying I'm like his mother, though I don't love McDull as much as Mrs. Mak does; in the stupidity I'm like McDull, and my kindness still falls short. I have to learn from the two of them.

Q: What about Brian Tse?

M: He's the real thing. If this were a record, he'd be the producer — he handles the whole of it, and I think he keeps his feelings out. He's actually a very simple person, very close to McDull, and at the same time he can see it from every other angle.

Q: Brian Tse has said the McDull stories are working on one problem: how a person can avoid twisting himself out of shape while still facing a fairly twisted world. Has the problem been solved?

M: Probably not. Even now, when McDull saves the Earth he does it his own way, and nobody understands the robot he builds out of a rice cooker, an iron and a washing machine. Only in the last five or ten minutes does everyone begin to get it. So to me, McDull still has endless difficulties to work through, and the next problem may be harder than saving the Earth.

Q: Have you started the next one?

M: I know the next one is resting. I don't know… This one, for instance, was made alongside the mother film (McDull: Me & My Mum, released in 2014), and that took three years. Several scripts are ready for the next one; we can't say yet which we'll make.

Q: Rise of the Rice Cooker and the mother film ran at the same time. But nothing was running alongside Rise of the Rice Cooker?

M: That's a good question. Creative people are very bad at controlling time. We used to do two at once so there wouldn't be too long a gap between releases. If we'd finished the mother film and only then started, I'd still be in Hong Kong rushing Rise of the Rice Cooker now — so we're a little ahead. Next time we hope to push two along together. I don't know how long the next one will take either. Two years, I hope. Otherwise the children will forget who McDull is.

Cover image source: m.bz55.com