McDull, Kung Fu Kindergarten 2009

The film opens with archaeologists uncovering a crudely made artifact during a survey before the area is flooded for the construction of the Three Gorges Dam. The find is traced to Mak-zi, also known as “McFat,” an ancient Chinese philosopher whose ideas and inventions feel ahead of their time—almost like precursors to modern devices before electricity existed. Yet the artifact’s rough fabrication leads museums to reject it, so it is placed on a barge and left to drift along the mighty Yangtze River. Centuries later, the legend reaches the present through Mak-zi’s descendant: McDull Jan Lam Hoi-Fung, a kindhearted kindergartner living in Hong Kong.

McDull’s world is upended when mounting debts and hard times push his mother, Mrs Mak Sandra Ng Kwan Yue, to leave their home in Tai Kok Tsui in search of fortune on the mainland. She decides McDull should enroll at the Spring Flowers Gate, a boarding Taoist martial arts academy tucked among the sacred peaks of the Wudang Mountains, while she travels through Wuhan, Shanghai, Suzhou, and Hangzhou to ply her trade. From the start, the little boy struggles to fit in, ostracized by peers who see him as an outsider—a Hong Konger in a distant land. Yet a mysterious mentor, Brother Panda Anthony Wong, offers him quiet encouragement and helps him dare to reach out and make friends.

As McDull grows closer to his new circle, excitement builds around a prestigious event: the International Kindergarten Martial Arts Competition. The expected turnout stirs anxiety among most students, and McDull finds himself weighing whether to stay or return home. On the way down the mountain—where the absence of modern conveniences mirrors a simpler era—he contemplates quitting, intent on calling his mother to quit the academy. But the master’s assistant, Miss Chan Dejay Choi, steps in and explains the deeper stakes behind the headmaster’s decades-long sacrifice: a once-celebrated martial arts prodigy who refused to abandon his Taoist roots, even as the world around him shifted. A historic clash with a contemporary icon, Pruce Lee (a playful nod to Bruce Lee), had sparked a fierce debate about whether Chinese martial arts should remain rooted in tradition or evolve with the times. The legendary duel, later dubbed the Battle of Luohu, unfolds across the Sham Chun River, the border between Hong Kong and Shenzhen, and lasts through a night before a Zen master intervenes, halting the conflict before it tears the community apart.

Even after the defeat, the headmaster withdraws into seclusion, harboring a dream of modernizing Taoist Kung Fu—with mixed results. He then shifts his focus to reopening the Spring Flowers Gate, adopting the guise of Brother Panda to recruit new students and to offer solace to the academy’s pupils. McDull is moved by the sacrifices surrounding the school and resolves to stay, rekindling his training and prompting his mother to attend the upcoming competition.

The competition day brings a familiar face: May, a friend from Hong Kong who has been taking part in a “wire-fu” summer camp sponsored by Yuen Woo-Ping, also competes in the event. Around this moment, the story reveals a new thread: the Mak-zi artifact, which somehow travels to the competition site and begins to pulse with life. As a large television audience watches, the artifact reveals itself as a crudely crafted clock in the shape of a chicken, powered by cow feces, capable of counting 100,000 years—one century at a time—via a sophisticated holographic display. This astonishing invention inspires Mrs Mak to return to Hong Kong and start a new business venture, while McDull, having endured a brutal match, returns home with new knowledge gleaned from Mak-zi’s original blueprints for the clock.

Back in Hong Kong, McDull sets to work building a new clock, guided by the historical blueprints, and the city’s skyline serves as a backdrop to his quiet persistence. The story then widens its lens to May’s life as an adult office worker who, one day, notices the clock in the sky. She traces its glow back to its source and discovers a charming restaurant in the middle of Hong Kong’s concrete jungle run by the grown-up McDull, turning a long journey of memory and invention into a hopeful present.

Interwoven throughout is a pseudo-documentary thread about Mak-zi’s broader legend, brought to life by Jim Chim as the Story teller, whose narration threads together the myth with McDull’s world, giving the film a sense of folklore married to a coming-of-age tale. The movie invites audiences to reflect on tradition and innovation, family bonds, and the quiet persistence that can turn a child’s dream into a city-wide wonder.