Alibaba’s Peppa Pig movie doesn’t have much Peppa Pig in it

Peppa Celebrates Chinese New Year is a live-action film with a lot of stereotypes

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Peppa Celebrates Lunar New Year is being shown in select theatres in the US. (Picture: Alibaba Pictures)

Josh Ye

Published: 8:55pm, 12 Feb 2019Updated: 8:52am, 20 Sep 2019

This article originally appeared on ABACUS

The new Peppa Pig movie is 81 minutes long. And Peppa is only in it for around 30 minutes.

That’s not even the weirdest thing about Alibaba’s new Peppa Pig movie, which isn’t a cartoon. it’s a live-action movie about a Chinese family coming together for Lunar New Year… except it’s got short Peppa Pig episodes sprinkled through the story.

(Abacus is a unit of the South China Morning Post, which is owned by Alibaba.)

It’s not a great combination. I struggled to stay awake, but children in the cinema visibly lost their minds when the cartoon family of pink swines appeared.

It’s not like the short Peppa Pig “episodes” are woven in artfully, either. They’re effectively standalone shorts that share a vague theme of celebration, with the movie starting with an episode of Peppa’s family going to a festival, and ending with Peppa’s family celebrating the Lunar New Year.

For instance, in the festival episode, there is a part where Peppa, George and their father had fun getting muddy after their camping site got rained on. However, that part has nothing to do with, say, the last short where Peppa learns the various traditions of Chinese New Year.