McDull•The Pork of Music: Affinity as a selling point

Introduction

Released in 2012, McDull·The Pork of Music is a well-known animated film in Hong Kong. The highlight of this film is the satirize jokes, eloquent word play and the cultural localness that elicits HKers’ empathic emotions. This review will analyze the text in consideration of cultural affiliation, stereotyped representations, and narration of identities in local films (topic 2,3,9).

Disadvantaged Groups in HK: grassroots lives

When analyzing the narration of identities in this text, it may be a cliché to talk about the familiar setting and background cartoons of HK’s street view and scenery. What’s more? The film actually represents different social classes with specific attributes, while how it mocks the everyday situation creates much fun to enjoy, but this film does not manipulate the feeling of nostalgia or use memory to form identity as some may suggest.

The story sets in with the principal’s hardship to run the kindergarten, like many Hong Kong people who can no longer run their business in small and medium enterprises.

Halbwachs mentions that “What makes recent memories hang together is not that they are contiguous in time: it is rather that they are part of a totality of thoughts common to a group” (Halbwachs 1992). The Pork of Music uses a lot of down-to-earth situations to narrate HKers’ identity. Satirize jokes take place when the kindergarten has to cut the cost: adding water into the milk, thinner biscuit, or even using a chestnut as the snack for months…It is like an everyday situation happened in any organization which have to lower the cost.

With the local cultural insights, many of the flawed characters appeared in the text and most of them are from the lower class. They are the kindergartens’ alumni who attended the fund-raising event for Spring Field Kindergarten, including the paint-splashing debt collectors, butcher, annoying household products salesmen, prisoners, etc. Their content of speech lively tells how Hong Kong people live their daily lives, like the bargaining between butchers and shoppers and how the salesmen promote their products in a similar way. The stereotyped representation of the groups creates a short cut for audience to recognize them, and empathic emotions would be elicited while watching the ‘gag’s in the text.

Hopes and dreams of Hong Kongers

The major conflict appeared in the drama would be the bitter disappointments in life faced by HK people. Principal’s love of music does not bring him an easy life, but the endless struggling process to operate the kindergarten. After years of struggle and renaming the kindergarten from “Winter Duck”, “Summer chicks” … and finally “Spring Field”, the principal is admired by the alumni for his faith in devoting in education. Many of the characters in Mcdull’s movies are portrayed as underachieving, for they represent the majority of HK people, kind of living in hardship but not too hard, generally recognized as smart persons but not too smart. In fact, the HK spirit is generally perceived as being tough, and to overcome the hardship again and again.

The discrepancy between dreams and reality is cruel, and Hong Kong is particularly a place full of bitter disappointments in life. K.W. Ma argues that, the urge for a stable identity is a persistent and recurrent drive in social and cultural practices in the era of increasing fluidity of identities (Ma 1999). Being musicians in Hong Kong is a road “less traveled by”, and most would be doomed to failure. The first part of the film talks about the principal’s love of music and his lifelong coaching for kids. After experiencing the loads of failure, the most touching part of the story is revealed in the ending that his effort was recognized by a passed away musician. 

By the way, I personally think there’s a word pun within the name of the film, the Pork of Music, ‘pork’ may not only refer to Mcdull as a piglet, but also the courage to devote oneself to music (the Cantonese homophone word ‘pok’ means courage).

Works Cited

Ma, K.W. (1999). Identity, culture, and the media. In Culture, politics and television in Hong Kong. (pp. 1-18). London: Routledge.

Halbwachs, M. (1992). (Ed. & translated by Coser. L.A.) Chapter 1-4. On Collective Memory. (pp.41-53). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

By Hazel, Tong Cheuk Ying (10487073/ 21047619)