Babe: Pig in the City

by Pat Holmes

DVD bacon...

he combination of fantasy and Western antics offered by the current Wild Wild West is sadly uninspired, as we mentioned here last week. You're better off creating your own fantasy/Western double feature with a visit to the video store.

For the fantasy part of the combo, it's a good time to correct a grievous error made by moviegoers last holiday season. I'm talking about the neglect of George Miller's wonderfully vibrant fantasy Babe: Pig In The City, recently released by Universal Studios Home Video on tape and, even better, letterboxed on DVD, so you can see every fully-packed frame. Killed off at the holiday box- office by Disney's fine A Bug's Life, but mostly by a poisonous buzz that cast the film as some kind of cinematic gargoyle out to terrify innocent little nippers, Miller's dizzyingly inventive twist on the pig tale he originally produced (but did not direct) was condemned for doing what any good movie—certainly any good sequel—ought to do.

As the title implies, this film takes the now famous sheep-pig to the big city, where the wife (Magda Szubanski) of the injured farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell, briefly) must change planes on the way to a county fair where Babe's appearance can raise the money to save Hoggett's farm from foreclosure. Having missed their connection, Mrs. Hoggett and Babe check into a genuine flea-bag hotel (it caters mostly to stray animals, along with an aging clown played by Mickey Rooney) and are soon separated, with the Missus mistakenly taken to the porky, er, pokey while Babe rallies the hotel's vast animal population, along with a posse of street strays and a pit-bull won over by Babe's courage, to save her bacon.

"It's a dog-eat-dog world," a resident chimp tells Babe."And there's not enough dog to go around."In other words, it's another world. It's a jungle out there, not the harmonious Hoggett farm, and the movie respects this change. Babe's honesty, bravery and kindness will be tested, as perhaps were the sensibilities of some of the more delicate tots in the audience—or that might have been in the audience if some apparently even more tremulous adults hadn't believed the nonsense about how "dark" the movie was. "Too dark" in this case pretty much translates as "too different" from the Oscar-nominated, money-making original. Different it is, and delightfully so. Dark it may be on occasion, but not disturbingly so—as most kids no doubt would have found.

iller, the creator of the Road Warrior trilogy, did what a good filmmaker should do when making a sequel. He created a new story for a familiar character, expanded and deepened the original, made something new while maintaining the best elements of the first film. In other words, he did just what George Lucas didn't do with a certain other sequel, um, prequel (more like, as David Letterman quipped recently, Nyquil) currently performing its sales pitch in the nation's multiplexes.

The city here is a stunning composite metropolis of world capitals, almost Dickensian in the density and richness of its physical texture and in its tale of a plucky innocent who learns the ways of that world and wins. Like the voice—deep and strong but also soft and reassuring in tone—of returning narrator Roscoe Lee Browne, Miller's overall tone and Babe's familiar decency relieve the menacing touches without sapping them. But sap is apparently what is expected of kids' movies these days. And that's another thing: This is not a kids' movie as The Phantom Menace is, but a family film, meant to appeal to all ages, perhaps even older kids and grownups as much as tiny tikes, who might even benefit from exchanged worries and reassurances with their parents. But the fact is, it ain't that scary anyway. What is scary, really, is that Miller did the unforgivable by doing the unexpected. He tried to make an imaginative, entertaining movie, and succeeded. The nerve of the guy.

What he also does is work wonders with the combination of live, animatronic and digital creatures that make up most of the characters. The animal cast is larger and more varied in this one, and the effects are so brilliantly managed (Miller nearly makes poetry of a melancholy orangutan) that it won't even occur to you to wonder how they did it. You simply accept it, like a late Christmas present.

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