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.
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