USA, G, 97 m, 1998
Directed by George Miller. Stars Magda Szubanski, James Cromwell, Mary Stein, et al.

I adored Babe. It was an exception amid most G-rated offerings for it delighted both the kiddy set and graying cineastes. What made Babe even more of an anomaly was that it wasn’t exclusively a technical triumph; its underlining thesis was universally immaculate. The farm on which the orphaned piglet Babe and his shaggy cronies resided was a relatively idyllic retreat, but the movie didn’t gloss over the fact that some of the animals were doomed to carry out the ignominious function of inflating human paunches. (Only a pitiless creep on the order of Don Zaidle could ponder this with waterless eyes.) A virtually flawless, well-polished jewel, Babe had a lot of heart—and big laughs, too. Chris Noonan’s direction was strikingly amiable, but George Miller (who served as executive producer and co-screenwriter on Babe) assumes the directorial duties of Babe: Pig in the City, and his sensibilities are a shade darker. This sequel has all the wit and imagination of its predecessor, but its design is conversely madcap—almost Felliniesque. Babe sent you away with an unerring glow, but Babe: Pig in the City is an often emotionally harrowing experience. It may be a fatally gratuitous gesture to contrast the two films, though, since they are so blessedly dissimilar. Babe: Pig in the City avoids all the pitfalls usually associated with sequels, and it's a staggeringly brilliant achievement. A masterpiece of surrealism, I believe. The boundlessly inventive Miller has forged sequences here as great as any ever filmed, many of which we would've never dreamed were capable of being realized. Babe: Pig in the City is the zenith of this director’s calling for it’s not only the consummate showcase for his inimitable visual flair, but it contains episodes of passion so heart-rending that even the most unflappable of viewers will find it difficult to suppress the tears.

Babe: Pig in the City is more hurriedly paced than the first film, and this is not because it lacks the same degree of patience, but because Miller is sweating to approximate the frenzied tempo of life in the big city. There’s so much to absorb that a second or third viewing may be necessary to fully comprehend the aesthetic and emotional complexity of Miller’s vision. The show starts off precisely where the last one left off: Having secured a gleaming trophy for his impressive sheep herding skills, Babe (the winsome voice of Christine Cavanaugh is undiscernibly supplanted by E.G. Daily this time) and Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) are returning home in a jubilant procession. Streamers fill the air as the onlookers roar, a marching band plays “If I Had Words” (Babe’s signature song) and a skywriter scrawls “champ” in the sky. (It first appears disconcertingly as “ham,” but the book-ending letters quickly follow.) As the fervor dissipates, life on the farm returns to a snail’s pace, but only for a scant moment. In a simultaneously hilarious and horrifying piece of slapstick, an inquisitive Babe unwittingly sets into motion a succession of happenings that eventually cast Farmer Hoggett into the inky abyss of the cropland’s well, landing the darling fellow in bed with a myriad of broken bones. (The beautifully robust, grandfatherly voice of returning narrator Roscoe Lee Browne reminds us that “fate turns on a moment, dear ones.”) Babe casts his repentant eyes upon his bandaged boss, and the farmer extends his hand, but Babe laments not having the words to extend an apology. (The hindrance of spoken language between man and beast is a theme carried over from the first film.) Ever the humble and gracious soul, our curly-tailed protagonist vows to make it up to his kindly master.

Soon, two dark silhouettes appear at the farm’s gate. “Men with pale faces and soulless eyes,” the narrator tells us. “Such men could’ve come from only one place—the bank.” The farm is in danger of repossession, so Mrs. Hoggett (stout, apple-cheeked Magda Szubanski) plans to enter Babe in an unspecified state fair for a generous appearance fee (one of the thousand or so offers the Hoggetts received after Babe took home the gold). With Babe in arms (sorry), Mrs. Hoggett packs her suitcase (that wry Greek chorus of mice hitching a ride inside) and catches a plane, unwittingly bound for one of the screen’s truly great adventures. The hilariously neurotic duck, Ferdinand (voiced again by Danny Mann), can’t abide being separated from his “lucky pig,” so he vigorously flaps his tiny wings to keep up with Babe’s plane. Upon landing at a swarming, inhospitable airport, Mrs. Hoggett is strip-searched on suspicion of smuggling drugs, and this causes her to miss her connecting flight, which leaves our heroes stranded in a sprawling, unnamed megalopolis. This enigmatic city is a striking amalgam of celebrated landmarks such as the Golden Gate Bridge, the Statue of Liberty, the World Trade Center, the “Hollywood” sign, and so forth. Italian canals snake through the environs, and all fashions of strange characters loiter in the streets. Mrs. Hoggett’s quest to locate a stead disposed to accommodating a gal with her pig proves ruefully unavailing, but a sympathetic gentleman (touting a porker’s snout, no less) directs her to a flophouse accepting of four-legged transients. Operated by a spindly, bird-featured eccentric (Mary Stein), the three-tired, modestly furnished structure grants sanctuary to a colorful variety of cats, fish, primates and dogs, which includes Flealick, a paralyzed pooch who manages to scoot around in a little wheeled harness that’s hitched around his tummy. While Mrs. Hoggett is away, a capuchin monkey (Tug) snatches her suitcase, and Babe chases him to a room occupied by a family of performing chimpanzees, overseen by a solemn-faced orangutan named Thelonious. The ensuing exchange between Babe and the female chimp Lola (a gum-smacking floozy voiced impeccably by Glenne Headley), her shiftless, sardonic husband Bob (voiced by the peerlessly deadpan Steven Wright) and their son Easy (alternately voiced by Nathan Kress and Myles Jeffrey) is one of the movie’s funniest moments. Soon, the apes’ “human,” a strange, wordless clown named Fulgy Floom (Mickey Rooney), returns home and makes Babe part of his act. In one of the movie’s most bizarre and visually arresting moments, a show in a children’s hospital goes terribly awry as Fulgy’s confetti-filled cannon backfires, the set catches fire and collapses, and the room’s sprinklers go off—all to the strains of Edith Piaf’s haunting “Non, Je Ne Regrette Rien.” (Miller uses popular music for contrasting effect as effectively as David Lynch does.)

After Mrs. Hoggett gets arrested for inadvertently starting a riot while defending herself from some brutish bikers, and the landlady rushes off to her uncle Fulgy’s side at the hospital following a life-threatening heart attack, the animals find themselves on their own—and painfully sans sustenance. During a haphazard night raid on a warehouse for food, the chimps trick Babe into distracting some ferocious guard dogs. Babe's diplomacy with sheep is woefully ineffectual with the dogs, though, and they rip their chains out of the ground, pursuing Babe through the city streets in what has to be the most intense and imaginatively mounted chase scene in years. One particular guard dog, a bull terrier named P.T., is relentless in his pursuit of Babe, and his chain (with post in tow) winds up accumulating a plethora of discarded junk including a manual lawn mower. As the pounding chords of Nigel Hawthorne’s musical score begin to assume an eerie resonance, Babe’s tiny legs begin to tire, and random images from his short life begin to flash through his mind. He stops in the middle of a covered bridge, turns to his lunging attacker and asks, “Why?” A sliver away from delivering a fatal chomp, the dog’s neck is suddenly snapped back by the weighted chain, but the sheer force knocks Babe into the brook. He swims to safety, but the dog, still intent on reaching his prey, winds up dangling head-first in the water. As P.T.’s breathless husk splashes about helplessly, the animal onlookers quietly retreat from the chill in the night air to the solitude of their homes. But Babe, of course, can't walk away; he saves P.T. from drowning, and the grateful dog becomes his fierce protector. He requests Babe to honor him by wearing his studded collar, and he informs the other animals, “What the pig says, goes!”

In one particularly lovely scene, the chimps’ bounty (a jar full of jellybeans) is evenly dispensed to a procession of the hotel’s inhabitants (and a bunch of strays taken in off the streets) as P.T. commands each recipient to “thank the pig” who sits grandly before his subjects in the lobby. True to form, Babe responds to each grateful creature with the customary “you’re awfully welcome.” (Funny how those words seem so alien these days. I suggest children follow Babe’s lead, and adults follow theirs.) The communion concludes with all the animals partaking in a chorus of “If I Had Words,” the resplendent notes reaching to the heavens, which finally alerts the frazzled Ferdy to Babe’s location. The glorious reverie is soon broken, though, as a posse of fascist, jackbooted animal-control officers storm the hotel, sending the poor creatures scurrying in every direction as their attackers systematically cage, bag and leash them. The scene is truly distressing, but Miller doesn’t make it cheap. True, the last thing we’d expect in a sequel to Babe are moments with echoes of the Krakow liquidation sequence in Schindler's List, but let’s not forget that the first movie offered up many dark moments of its own. The Holocaust analogy was first brought up in Babe as the movie opened with the pig parents being ripped from their children and hauled away to certain slaughter. Here it’s taken even farther, and it’s a difficult sequence. Determined to save his comrades, Flealick grabs a hold of the truck with his chops, and rolls along with it before being knocked off into the gutter. In dark silhouette, he lies motionless in the rain soaked street, the misshapen wheels of his little cart eerily creaking in the wind. (Once again, Hawthorne’s haunting score succeeds in saturating and intensifying the already potent imagery.) At this moment, Miller presents us with a poignant glimpse into Flealick’s unconscious mind as the dog envisions himself frolicking through impossibly vibrant flora, his cart rendered unnecessary and discarded in the brush. But soon Babe’s calming voice awakens the unfortunate pooch, and they’re off and running again.

Babe’s resourcefulness inevitably sets the animals free, and the fantastic chain of events concludes at an illustrious gala with fat cats falling into cakes and Mrs. Hoggett bungee-jumping from the ballroom ceiling in inflatable clown pants. (Uh, it's a long story.) This capping sequence is a protracted, albeit ingeniously designed piece of sustained slapstick, which ends with a flurry of bright blue balloons covering the floor and the orangutan Thelonious saving a baby chimp that falls from a chandelier. In the first movie, Babe’s unprejudiced heart brought peace to the valley; in this endlessly enchanting sequel, he brings the two worlds of bucolic rural and hectic urban together by bringing his newfound friends back home. A fully recuperated Farmer Hoggett is back to tinkering with the water pump, which he finally manages to get working. He smiles at Babe and once again whispers those immortal words, “That'll do.”

I’ve watched Babe: Pig in the City a half-dozen times since its release last year, and upon each viewing I find myself still buzzed by the ingenuity of its design. (Inexplicably, the movie tanked at the box office, which dashed any hopes for a third adventure with our porcine pal. But there are enough ideas in either Babe outing for a hundred good movies, anyway.) Like any ground-breaking work of art, Babe: Pig in the City compels you to run out and talk about it, but you find yourself feeling protective towards it, too. Folks can dismiss my raves of Alien Resurrection or Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, insisting I’m totally out of my head, and I can shrug it off. But I can’t abide them chiding me for embracing this gloriously insane piece of moviemaking. It’s probably the greatest sequel ever made.

That’ll more than do.

November 25, 1999

© Copyright 2008 by Edward Larsen Terkelsen. All rights reserved.