The little-seen My Life as McDull is at the top of the animated-films-that-should-be-available-on-DVD wish list. All images © 2002 Bliss Distribution Ltd. All rights reserved.

We’ve all got want lists of animated features we wish were available on DVD. They never do any good, even the online petitions with 2000 people demanding, I say, demanding action. But they remind us of our priorities. My list, hopeless as it is, includes Twice Upon a Time, Animalympics and A Boy Named Charlie Brown. In fact all those titles exist on home video; it just takes work to find them, stranded as they are in an out-of-print limbo of clamshell videotapes or laserdiscs back in the geological strata of 1980s consumer video.

There’s one animated movie of more recent vintage that, if more people knew about it, they’d be working like hell to score a copy of: My Life As McDull, a 2001 feature that screened in Los Angeles last month as part of a continuing series at Walt Disney Concert Hall’s REDCAT theater.

There is no greater way to sucker-punch an audience than to look like a children’s film when you are actually an existential, animated cri de coeur with plushies.

I think Jules Feiffer made a similar discovery several years ago in another medium when he wrote The Man in the Ceiling. The hero of Feiffer’s book is a young cartoonist in his early ‘tweens, and the story concerns all the pressures he must endure — the popular friend with story ideas, the younger sister with temper tantrums, the mother who makes a living as a graphic artist, the father who thinks art isn’t real work, and the playwright uncle with nothing but flops under his belt whose latest play becomes the unexpected potential hit that turns the household upside-down.

McDull is based on a popular comic by Alice Mak (left) and directed by Toe Yuen, a former comics magazine editor and toy designer.

In short, it’s about art and the terrible, awful process of making it, and in the end this is a book about failure. It looks and acts like a novella for children, but don’t be fooled, because for all artists, and for that matter anyone who’s ever tried to accomplish anything great, this is a heartbreaker full of hope but missing the happy ending or easy answers.

Instead of going to see Wallace and Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit on opening night last month, I took a chance on a special screening of My Life as McDull. McDull is based on a popular comic by Alice Mak and was directed by Toe Yuen, a former comics magazine editor and toy designer. At first blush, this Hong Kong-produced traditionally-animated feature is a kid-vid story of a pig and his mother. In fact it may look family-friendly, but this is actually an incredibly efficient vehicle for breaking your grownup heart. The unprepared viewer may be so completely bamboozled by the bright colors, cute animals and charming watercolor textures that he will hardly notice his urge to weep when the film takes its amazing third-act turn.

McDull is a pig, plump and plush with an orange-ribbed eye, somewhat witless and sickly but with a great lazy parenthesis of a smile. He lives in the endless Hong Kong sprawl with his mother. Mama at home is a loving single mom with great expectations for her son, whereas at work she’s a grinning Martha Stewart-esque harpy with her own cooking show and a get-ahead attitude that brooks no wimp-outs. In one of the film’s funniest gags McDull imagines Mama as the heroine of her own video game, jumping over cars in the street, racing the other moms to the grocery checkout, and finally defeating the evil boss-like Man With Briefcase for 10,000 points.