A pig invents the internet before electricity exists and nobody in the movie questions it for a second. McDull watches this unfold with the same blank stare he'd give a grocery list. The joke isn't that it's absurd, the joke is that absurdity is just how the world works, and McDull is too tired to care.

Archaeologists surveying land that will soon be flooded by the Three Gorges Dam unearth a crudely made artifact. They trace it to Mak-zi, also called McFat, an ancient Chinese philosopher whose many inventions arrived before their time, including electronic gadgets dreamed up long before electricity. The object is so rough that every museum in China and overseas refuses it. No one is willing to destroy it, so it is placed on a barge that keeps sailing up and down the Yangtze River. Eighteen generations later, the story turns to Mak-zi's descendant McDull, a kindergartener growing up in Hong Kong, in this comedy film.