(The greedy villain is a kid Dicky's age who proclaims his entrepreneurial lust for global domination to the entire schoolroom.)Ĭhow's movie does not seem to be a cynical marketing tool.
On one hand, it seeks to show that poverty is nothing to be ashamed of and that integrity and forgiveness are more worthwhile values than competition or class status. "CJ7" offers a mixed assortment of "messages" for children. In other words, a Furby from another planet, combined with Wilson from " Cast Away." But Dicky is disappointed when he discovers its low-tech features. Dicky, who has envied another boy's CJ1 robo-dog, is stricken with hubris and christens his thingy a CJ7 - six generations of technological advancement over his classmate's.ĬJ7 is everything a kid could want: It's a ball, it's a dog, it's a cat, it's a friend, it's a toy and it's from outer space. After a while, it is transformed into a kind of throbbing, light-emitting oversized molar, and then it turns into a furry-faced, chartreuse-bodied pet toy (part Pekingese, part Persian, part alien) with a waggy Po-tail sticking out of its head. Dicky's dad finds it in a pile of trash among the abandoned computer monitors, TVs, refrigerators and illegally parked UFOs.Īt first it's nothing but a ball with a knob/plunger on the top. It's like one of those glass floats they use for decor in seafood restaurants, but it's squishy and it glows. The second-most adorable creature in the universe is the title character, who originally appears as a plastic glow-in-the-dark ball in a piece of fish netting. (I was even more delighted to discover, after seeing the movie, that the child who plays him is not a boy at all but a precociously talented 9-year-old girl.) This is an appealing trait, but Dicky - while flawed and tantrum-prone - also possesses a goofy, innocent charm that triggers adults' adoption instincts. He even has fuzzy ears, which are illuminated like downy halos whenever he's seen in closeup and he's lit from behind. He is so cute and expressive that he's more like a puppy than a boy. It helps that Dicky is the most adorable creature in the universe. A beautiful teacher, Miss Yuen ( Kitty Zhang Yuqi), is sweetly sympathetic to Dicky's tattered and, let's face it, lovably grubby condition. Cao ( Shing-Cheung Lee, a bespectacled Chinese Stephen Merchant) is so germ-o-phobic that he thinks Dicky is a pathogenic vector. Dad works construction jobs and shops at hazmat dump sites to keep Dicky enrolled in a fancy private school, where he has a reputation for being unhygienic, although he's really just a little muddy and smudgy. A poor boy named Dicky ( Xu Jiao) lives with his father, Ti (Chow, actor-director of " Kung Fu Hustle" and " Shaolin Soccer"), in an urban ruin.
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