Geoffrey Rush, Sam Neill, John Cleese, Hugo Weaving, and a host of Australian talent you may not have heard of voice this 2000 movie, which had a big budget for an Australian animated feature... and they produce an embarrassing mess. Which is a shame, not only from the point of view of Australian feature animation, but because it is based on such an iconic and aclaimed 19th Century Australian story.

Written in the 1890's by Norman Lindsay, The Magic Pudding is the bizarre story of a sentient and bad tempered steak and kidney pudding called Albert. He has arms and legs, and never runs out, no matter how often he gets eaten.

Roughly speaking the story as told in the movie involves two intersecting storylines. In one, Bill Barnacle (a human) and Sam Sawnoff (a penguin) are shipwrecked in icy seas, along with their large, nasty wombat shipmate, Buncle. Shortly afterwards, for no apparent reason, an object explodes out of the ice, shoots into the stratosphere and lands at their feet. It proves to be Albert, the pudding, who immediately tells them to 'shutup and eat me.'

Cut to Bunyip Bluegum, a young koala who has just come of age and decided to go looking for his long lost parents. He soon runs into the other characters (how they got into the Australian Bush, I'm not sure), and they allow him to join their 'pudding owner's society'. Meanwhile Buncle, who has split ranks with his old mates is trying to steal the pudding back. Oh, Albert can also change flavours. Is this bizarre enough yet?

What happened to make such a mess of this movie? The animation, for 2000, is basically awful, especially considering it wasn't made on a shoestring. The voice talent is mostly adequate (though I think Geoffrey Rush fails badly as the young koala), but it should have been much better. It argues against putting big stars in animated movies for their pulling power rather than their vocal flexibility (though it worked very well in 'Antz').

There is some rudimentary cgi, but mostly it's 80's quality televison 2D.

I must admit that the style of the characters is a little disconcerting, too. There is a reasonable effort to try to stay faithful to the original 1890's book illustrations with the major characters, so you can imagine how odd that's going to look. The incidental native animal characters have more of a modern look. And the sight of an eternally scowling, amorphous brown blob with eyes and spidery arms and legs, who demands that everyone eat him, even though it's faithful to the original, is pretty disconcerting when animated. To be honest I always thought it was kinda scary full stop. Cleese voices the pudding, BTW.

I made it through most of the movie but actually fell asleep before the end, so I can't tell you how it ends, but based on the 50 minutes I saw, I don't really care. I only sat through it past the five minute mark so I'd have at least something sensible to say about it.

This film bombed in Australia, despite great expectations and plenty of hype, and is already basically forgotten. You can buy it on DVD on region 4, but why would you want to?

I'm only giving it an extra half star based on the remote possibility that it improved a lot in the last 20 minutes.