Babe: Pig In The City

I've never seen the first "Babe", the one that was nominated for Best Picture in 1995. I was ten when it came out and a non-animated film about a talking pig did not pique my interest. The sequel that followed in 1998 didn't register on my radar at all as I figured it would just be more of the same shenanigans. However, "Babe: Pig In The City flopped at the box office and was lambasted by some critics for being too different from its predecessor. Fans were expecting another light romp with their favorite barnyard characters and director George Miller (of Mad Max fame) instead supplied them with a darker, more visually stunning approach. As the film ended up making both Siskel and Ebert's top ten of 1998 list, even topping Siskel's, and has now developed a cult following, I decided it was time to forget my biases and watch this underrated film.

"Babe: Pig In The City" is a remarkable achievement. It defies classification as a family film or children's picture. Obviously the main characters are talking animals, but they live in a world straight out of a Terry Gilliam movie. I can't stress enough how fantastic this movie is. Pixar fans consistantly tout those films as being made for all ages; that there are jokes subtle enough for the parents, but the kids will love the characters and scenery. "Wall-E" and "Up" have made adults bawl in their theatre seats. Personally, I've enjoyed every Pixar film I've watched, but none would ever make any top movie list of mine. "Babe: Pig In The City" is the first film I've seen in who knows how long that fits those qualifications.

Within ten to twenty minutes I knew I was watching something special. The set of "Metropolis", the city where Babe and his owner stay, is wonderfully charming, quaint, mysterious, and wild at the same time. It represents all cities, having landmarks as varied as the Statue of Liberty, Sydney's Opera House, and the Golden Gate Bridge, and the sight of seeing all those buildings and monuments in one realistic setting was mind-blowing. The narrator describes the farm Babe is from as a "little left of the Twentieth Century". The farm is a beautiful place and the juxtaposition of Babe on the farm and in the city is jarring at first. Then we discover that "Metropolis" has Venitian waterways home to a hotel for talking animals and Mickey Rooney in a clown suit and everything feels a little better.

I don't know how they made it look like the animals were talking, (a combination of real animals, special effects, and puppets I presume), but the "acting" by the variety of creatures Babe the pig encounters is realistic and engrossing. There are monkeys wearing clothes, including an orangutan named Thelonius who has come to adore his human keeper and perhaps like King Louie, aspires to be human too. The animals' faces in this movie all carry very realistic human expressions and Thelonius with his combination of wisdom, sadness, and mysteriousness was my favorite character.

There were defintely some dark moments. There is a scene where a character comes close to drowning that reminded me of the scene in the most recent episode of "Lost" where Sayid is forcebly held underwater. What makes the dark scenes in this movie even darker is that unlike a old time Disney cartoon or even computer animated Pixar creation, the animals in this movie are real and lifelike. It's not like watching Nemo the fish or Ratatouille the rat narrowly escape death. The fact that these are real animals in a real world with real rules with discernable personalities is very affecting for the viewer. I didn't cry, but some scenes made me feel very anxious and sad. The movie's also hilarious, with the laugh out loud scenes outnumbering the melancholy ones.

I find it hard to describe just what the tone of "Babe: Pig In The City" was. It's similar to a lifelike version of those old Warner Brothers and Disney shorts, minus most of the slapstick. It's one of the few films made for children in the last decade-plus with the same intelligence as those old cartoons from the forties and fifties. It almost felt like a children's movie that Terry Gilliam or Guillermo Del Toro would create, but there was something about that transcended any sort of description. The combination of the art direction, sets, characters, music (including Piaf's "Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien", Martin's "That's Amore", and Elvis' "Are You Lonesome Tonight" sung by high-pitched mice), and script took me away so fully to this world that I can only be in awe of the people behind it. If you're against the idea of watching a movie like this just like I was, I implore you to give it a look anyway. This is why movies exist.