Babe: Pig in the City 1998
This is a pretty neat movie. Almost all the main characters are animals and humans pretty much have cameoes. They should have stuck just to the animals since they turned in the better performances.
This is maybe the first movie where the technical side of making animals talk has done its job so well that you can actually concentrate on the animals as characters, not just animals. Whether it was through excellent training or amazing special effects these are the best performances you have ever seen. Not just in terms of making the mouths move, but the believability of it all. This is legitimately some of the best acting in movies this year and it is done by animals.
Gene Siskel said this was his favorite movie of the year and surpassed the original movie. I’m not so sure about that. Though I admit the cityscapes were well done and the effects and tricks with the animals were startling, the story was a little lacking. I didn’t think Babe had that much to really accomplish (we’ve all seen save the farm movies before) and I also think the story should have stuck with the animals and avoided the humans as much as possible. You don’t feel for the humans (esp. the shrill Mrs. Hoggett) in this story like you felt for Farmer Hoggett in the original. The original story of Babe focused on the relationship between a man and his pig and how that man was able to be convinced of something that went against everything he had ever learned and give a pig a chance to be a sheepdog despite the public ridicule for trying. That’s missing from this movie.
There are also notable flaws in this movie. Though it is a great scene when a female monkey, having never seen a pig before, refers to Babe as “some kind of pink and white bald thingy,” she goes on to use “thingy” four or five more times, robbing the original of some of its impact: better writing would have equipped her with a wider but just as vacuous vocabulary. The older monkey whose face is so intensely expressive becomes one-dimensional. He only has that one look. It is a haunting look, but that’s all he’s got. All the humans were lacking: Mickey Rooney was just too weird (and I don’t like him anyway). The hotel owner was thrown in but never really developed. Even worse was the doctor from the pound who is portrayed as an important character really has nothing to do with anything. And saddest of all was the gaping absence of Farmer Hoggett (after L.A. Confidential James Cromwell may have had bigger fish to fry).
There are moments in this movie that are horribly heart-wrenching (not in a Lassie-died-saving-the-boy kind of way, but almost an Oliver Stone Platoon kind of way) which I think shows again just how well the film was made and presented. I stuck around at the end to find out who did the voices and didn’t recognize anyone (except Steven Wright sans nasal monotone). So many movies with talking animals feel a need to find stars to do the voices and it doesn’t always work. A Bug’s Life is a perfect example of that. Babe had some perfect voices (Wright’s hippie monkey was priceless) and nothing was taken away by the distraction of recognizing the star’s voice. Instead the voices had to really act.
There are also some very cute and very funny moments. Babe is tricked into herding some “sheep” that turn out to be killer guard dogs. As the vicious dogs turn on him he naively yells out Baa Ram Ewe, the code words that worked so well on real sheep in the first movie. Ferdinand the Duck is wonderful and the bit parts are even played well by goldfish, pink poodles, hungry kittens, and pathetic chihuahuas.
Do yourself a favor and see this before it goes to video. This was a much better film than its box office ever realized.
I give it a B+
Owned on: Blu-ray, Digital