Babe is not, as James Cromwell points out in a new interview for the film’s new Blu-ray release ($19.96, Kino Lorber, in a double feature with Babe: Pig in the City), a children’s film. It is, rather, an “adult fairy tale,” a distinction that helps to explain its generation-spanning endurance in the popular culture, in the cinephile’s library, and in the annals of vegan agitprop.
Among G-rated live-action films, it’s hard to imagine a more traumatic opening than Babe’s, a “cruel and sunless world” in which the title character’s mother is wrenched from her cage in a factory farm and trucked to her slaughter — a destination that the leftover pigs, in their infinite capacity for optimism, assume to be a porcine paradise so perfect that the taken never want to return.
We know this about Babe and her cellmates because of the movie’s concise narration but also because the script, adapted from Dick King-Smith’s 1983 novel The Sheep-Pig, grants its animals the ability of cross-species communication on a wavelength the film’s dense humans cannot comprehend. The astonishing visual effects, courtesy of Jim Henson’s Creature Shop, contour the animals’ mouths in speechlike patterns, but this feels like a concession for the viewer. What Babe is really depicting is a secret language of underground codes and arcane passwords, a kind of animal telepathy. In the three decades since Babe’s release, scientific research on animal language — 250 unique whistles shared by dolphins; elephants that have given each other distinct names through low-frequency vocal emissions — suggest that its barnyard babble was more foresight than fantasy.
In this environment of deep animal feeling and quasi-agency, Babe (Christine Cavanaugh) serves as the ultimate naïf, capable only of kindness and lacking the cunning or guile that the other furry and feathered denizens of the Hoggetts’ farm have developed as survival mechanisms. This allows Babe to become susceptible to schemes and manipulations, a convenient co-conspirator for Ferdinand the Duck (Danny Mann), who enlists Babe in a plot to pilfer Ma Hoggett’s new alarm clock so that he might continue to crow like a rooster every morning and thus preserve his utility on the farm (i.e., he’ll be seen as anything other than food).
Babe, whose memory of losing his mother is still fresh, is also the perfect consoler for border collie Fly when Arthur Hoggett (Cromwell) decides to sell off her puppies. His future undefined, Babe is everything to everyone; crucially for Arthur and for the plot, he’s an unorthodox shepherd — a “sheep pig” whom Arthur believes can do the job every bit as capably as his aging canines.
It’s the genius of Babe that while humans are presented as its most oddball species — we give each other strange, unappreciated gifts every Dec. 25, we measure our worth based on a bunch of numbers on spreadsheets, and we turn basic tenets of agricultural life into weird competitions — the film is rich with meaning for us Homo sapiens, especially for viewers with developing brains.
By adopting such a clear-eyed view of industrial farming, it offers an unsentimental understanding of death. Babe recognizing his own mortality is among its more philosophically rich scenes.
Just as importantly, though, is the film’s insistence that we can all rise above our stations and transcend our destinies when our intentions remain pure, and with an occasional hand up when the task seems insurmountable. I have no doubt that if this movie was released in the era of social media, the #belikebabe hashtag would trend everywhere.
Babe: Pig in the City, its sequel released three years later, picks up in the immediate aftermath of its predecessor’s climax, and initially channels its gratifying combination of empathy, whimsy and directness. Babe has become a celebrity of international renown, so that when bankers — described by the film’s narrator as “men with pale faces and soulless eyes” — appear ready to foreclose on the Hoggetts’ farm, an invitation for Babe to appear at an overseas worlds fair seems like the only lucrative solution to save their business.
No sooner do audiences reacquaint themselves with the familiar beasts of Babe does the movie abandon them, placing Ma Hoggett (Magda Szubanski), Babe and us in a wholly unfamiliar environment. After missing their connection to the fair due to a fracas involving airport security, this unlikely pair finds itself in a dilapidated hotel for unwanted animals in an unnamed storybook metropolis.
Pig in the City is, like its superior forbear, a film about, as the narrator puts it, “how a kind and steady heart can mend a sorry world.” But it often replaces the original’s sublimity with ridiculousness. George Miller, who co-wrote Babe, directs this time around, and it has the gonzo hallmarks of the Mad Max auteur’s caffeinated style, which I must concede has never been a personal favorite.
At its best, the action scenes play out with a Rube Goldberg complexity, as on Ma Hoggett’s first encounter in an urban environment, which plays amusingly off rural stereotypes of big-city entropy. The movie peaks midway through with a chase between Babe and a ferocious pit bull through canal-lined Venetian-style cobblestone streets, culminating in an act of turn-the-other-cheek heroism that reminds us why this pig was so special in the first place.
But Pig in the City gradually grows tiresome, as the manic set pieces pile atop each other like detritus in a junkyard. There is much antic movement in settings chockablock with gilded breakables, but the gags are more mid-level Zucker Brothers than Jacques Tati ingenuity.
And yet, just beneath the surface, Pig in the City is a more sophisticated film, in a purely technical sense, than its more organically charming forbear. The movie’s many shadows have the outsized heft of German Expressionism, and in a moment in which Babe’s life is on the line, Miller inserts flickers of Eisensteinian associative montage that still present as daring, nearly 30 years hence.
And the sets are marvels of deliberate artificiality, particularly its uber-city overhead shot populated by landmarks ranging from the Golden Gate Bridge to the Statue of Liberty to the Hollywood sign to the Sydney Opera House. Long before multiverse stories outlasted their welcome, leave it up to Babe to be everywhere all at once.