Disney’s first fully Chinese film, The Magic Gourd (Baohulu de mimi) or more known as The Secret of the Magic Gourd globally is mildly amusing but is overall disappointing. Co-produced with Hong Kong computer effects firm Centro and co-directed by John Chu, Magic Gourd is a story about a young boy coming across a mysterious magic gourd which helps him achieve anything he wants simply by thinking about it.
SPOILER WARNING: Plot and/or ending details follow.
Wang Bao (Zhu Qilong) is a young boy who fails miserably at his academic as well as at extra-curricular activities. He always wake up late and fail to finish his homework. One day, after being ridiculed at school, Wang Bao runs into a forest with his fishing pole and pail and discovers a mystical lake as he trespasses the beyond the forest’s limitation. Even when he’s fishing, he lies down and falls asleep, which simply shows how lazy the young boy is. As expected, his fishing pole suddenly shakes and he wakes up and catches the magic gourd.
The Magic Gourd (Lau Ching-Wan, Cantonese version / Peisi Chen, Mandarin version) tells the boy that he can grant every wish come true. After telling the gourd what he wants and the gourd failing to grant it, Wang Bao walks away disbelievingly before the gourd strongly emphasizes to Wang that he needs to agree to become the gourd’s master in order to be able to grant wishes. With the promise of having every wish come true without having to do an ounce of work, Wang immediately becomes the gourd’s master and immediately, the gourd grants Wang’s wish of getting a lot of fish. The gourd grants Wang hundred of fish with all of fish floating in the air. Wang purposely chooses a few variety of gold fish. After that, the gourd grants Wang food, with majority of them being fast food after the boy tells him that he’s hungry.
Then, Wang abruptly flies to the school with a mini plane, driven by the gourd so that he can show off to his friends that he can actually catch fish. When his friends see the gold fish in his pail, they quickly point out that goldfish does not live in the lake or sea water. This instance forces Wang Bao to go to the school library to borrow a book after sea creatures.
How brilliant is the magic gourd anyway? There are many occasions in which the gourd tries to grant the boy wishes but ends up screwing him up – when Wang Bao wants to get into a sold-out movie with dinosaurs, the gourd literally puts him into the movie next to a T-Rex, when Wang Bao wants to “eat” his opponent’s chess pieces (the Chinese says “eat” instead of “capture” in chess), so the gourd literally puts the chess pieces into Wang Bao’s mouth. When Wang Bao says he wants all the toys from the toy store, the gourd has every toy from the toy store move to his room.
While the movie lacks the effects and a strong storyline, the actors presumably have done very well in their roles. The voice of Hong Kong actor Lau Ching-Wan manages to give life to the gourd with his amusing voice performance that otherwise, the movie would have been a total failure. Gigi Leung, meanwhile acts as Wang Bao’s teacher that her existence is merely to teach the kids a valuable lesson with sayings like “there’s no such thing as an unearned reward”.
Eventually, the Magic Gourd is a movie more suitable for kids with its objective to educate them instead of just mere entertainment.
Popularity: 1%
