This article is part of The Twelve Days of Doofmas, a daily series of articles on our favorite Christmas films that was released as Bonus Content leading up to Christmas Eve 2019.
I’m almost certain most of you won’t have heard of this film. In fact, here’s a screenshot of the top four comments on the film’s trailer on YouTube, which proves that even those of us who’ve seen it don’t realise we’ve heard of it:
Just so we’re all on the same page, here’s a link to said trailer. I don’t think it’ll clear anything up, but it’ll hopefully leave you with the right questions.
You see, Christmas, and the other traditionally winter based holidays, are a very strange thing below the equator. One of my first memories of Christmas is sitting there sweating in my underwear, trying to avoid the hot sunlight coming in through the windows as I watched Frosty the Snowman. Then a bit later, while Goofy and Mickey Mouse were eating a roast ham in their own TV Christmas special, I went outside and had cold meats and played on the slip n slide we’d set up in the hot and sunny backyard.
Almost all Christmas related imagery originates from the cold north; despite not being at all appropriate for those of us in the negative latitudes. Yet for some reason, there’s been little to no effort at all address this down here. Those of us in Australasia, Southern Africa, and South America are apparently content to spend one of the hottest days of the year expecting a man in a red snowsuit to come visit us, and to dream of a white christmas on a +30°C (+86°F) degree day.
What is so enchanting about The Magic Pudding, one of the few Australian Christmas films, is how it embraces this absurdity and inherent contradiction of Christmas in the warm south. The movie follows a heroic Koala named Bunyip. Bunyip is also the name of a traditional Indigenous Australian mythological creature, and roughly translates to “devil”. Our hero, uh, Devil, has just found out that he is not in fact an orphan, and his parents may still be alive somewhere – his uncles just never really went looking for them. Armed with this new knowledge, Devil decides to go on an adventure to find them. Apparently a regular Bilbo Baggins, Devil runs into unexpected and strange obstacles within site of the eucalyptus tree he calls home, presumably hinting that he has in fact never left the tree before. Perhaps neither have his uncles, hence the lack of searching until now.
Soon, Devil discovers the titular walking and talking bowl of magic pudding, called Albert, who has the magical ability to regrow any parts of him that are eaten (making him a source of endless pudding) as well as to switch into any type of pudding a person requests. Albert’s frankly insane backstory is quickly established, and we come to learn he’s a snarky character who, along with his two owners, are on the run from the evil Buncle, who just wants to eat Albert constantly. Devil’s story of lost parents strikes a chord with the gang though, and they agree to help him look. What follows are a series of bizarre events not worth going into, but it’s worth noting they’re usually surrounded by pleas from Albert asking people to eat him more – the only pleasure he gains in life is from being eaten, something his friends apparently don’t do enough. The one thing Buncle, the bad guy, actually wants to do.
The film ends with the trio of pudding owners rescuing Albert (and Devil’s parents) from Buncle, by asking Albert to turn into a million serves of pudding, something that tortures Albert a lot more than anything Buncle did, and results in what I think was maybe a bizarre homage to the ending of the animated Aladdin film, where Albert, now the size of a million puddings and looking not unlike the genie, eats Buncle. Albert then launches himself into space, explodes into a million separate puddings which are spread throughout space, and is then cosmically resurrected as he was before. As you can see, the movie is complete nonsense – a perfect encapsulation of Christmas in the southern hemisphere.
Furthermore, despite being a film no one has ever heard of, The Magic Pudding has a cast many other films would die for. Here’s a quick snippet of some of the highlights from from Google:
This is a film that takes a number of well established and well respected actors, and wastes them on something that wasn’t really relevant to anyone or anything, and will largely never be seen.
And if there’s a better summary of southern hemisphere Christmas than wasting a bunch of established traditions on people they’re not relevant to but who still love them, I haven’t seen it.
-Elliot
