Fridae

One of my favourite filmmakers happens to be Ed Wood (or at least Tim Burton’s version of the cross-dressing director), the man who couldn’t make a film if his life depended on it and yet managed to convey the fun and heady excitement of making a film to his audiences. Magika, for all its low-fi quality, is a film that conveys that honest love for films and casts a subtle movie magic all on its own.

The story – or what the film uses to lash together a series of musical sequences and sketch comedy skits – revolves around a girl and her kid brother who are transported to the land of Magika where myths, folk tales, and old Cathay legends of the archipelago come alive. Being very mortal humans, all they want to do is to get back to their home in the real world safely without say being eaten by witches or ogres and with the help of helpful natives.

The charm of Magika is its concept – all its denizens happen to be parodies of characters from Malayan and Indonesian folk tales and legends that made it into films made by the Cathay and Merdeka studios in the heyday of the Malayan film industry. Of course there’s the Orang Minyak but the funniest here could be Hang Tuah, reimagined as a tea money grubbing morality police chief, and a certain Pahang princess (played by Ning Baizura) that bears more than a resemblance to Maria Menado. These figures would be familiar to any reader of Social Studies textbooks or the long-running “True Singaporean Ghost Stories” in the 1990s, or any lover of Malay films from the 1950s and 60s. And as a bonus to this demographic, Magika is done in the musical genre style that used to be popular so many years ago – but of course updated with modern orchestration and writing.

Personally, I wish that Singaporean filmmakers – as acclaimed as they may be over in Cannes, Pusan, and elsewhere – can take a leaf from our northern neighbours and learn to make films that are actually enjoyable and wondrous to watch instead of the same tired, tedious, angsty stories. Like Ed Wood knew – films are meant to entertain and inspire.