Regardless of what the Chinese calendar may have said at the time, 1995 was the year of the pig, producing not one but two films featuring vocal pork. The first, Gordy, was so awful, it stirred up rumors about cryptic passages in ancient texts indicating that the appearance of two talking-pig movies in one year may be the first sign of a coming apocalypse. That talk was put to rest, however, by Babe, a delightful, universally adored film about a gallant, sweet pig who learns to herd sheep and, in the process, imparts a message of tolerance that's vague, inoffensive, and apolitical enough to be appreciated by everybody. It wasn't the sort of movie that demanded a sequel, and if anyone was clamoring for one, Babe: Pig In The City ought to shut them up. Grim and scary, Babe 2 opens with a lovingly detailed scene in which James Cromwell's beloved farmer character suffers a debilitating farm accident, which serves to send his wife (Magda Szubanski) and Babe off to a well-paying state-fair gig. But their journey is interrupted after the two are set up by a drug-sniffing dog and forced to spend time in a forbidding urban dystopia that for some reason includes the Eiffel Tower, the Sydney Opera House, and the Hollywood sign. Then Babe gets kidnapped by a grotesque clown played by Mickey Rooney, who, heartbroken after a performance in front of terminally ill children goes horribly awry in a Babe-related mishap, dies. Then things really start to get dark. Director George Miller (Mad Max) has for some reason decided to create a Babe sequel that suggests a long-lost collaboration between Walt Disney and Nelson Algren. The city of the title is dark. The characters Babe encounters, from a streetwise guard dog to a noble orangutan, are cynical and disillusioned, Babe and friends are in constant jeopardy. Just when Miller seems to have let the tension die, he follows up with another uncomfortable, expensive-looking scene of animals in jeopardy. Maybe it could have worked had the movie found a story worth telling, but it simply drifts from depressing incident to depressing incident, resembling the nightmare of an adorable but deeply emotionally scarred pig. Anyone with fond memories of Babe ought to avoid this mirthless, dispiriting sequel.