"It's a dog-eat-dog world, and there aren't enough
dogs to go around."
Would a sentiment like that ever be uttered in a
children's film today? It's only been a decade since Babe: Pig In The City—George Miller's
glorious fiasco of a sequel to the sleeper hit Babe—was shuffled in and
out of theaters, but it feels like a lifetime ago. We're now in the age of cute
anthropomorphized animals, not of the Babe variety, but of the kind voiced by wisecracking
comedians bringing their G material. And these films have been scrubbed of any
darkness and shadow, as if the Barney-addled children of today need to be shielded
from anything remotely scary or imposing. Can you imagine Pinocchio being released today? Or The
5,000 Fingers Of Dr. T? Even The Wizard Of Oz?
Take Barnyard, an offensively inoffensive animated
comedy released a couple of years ago. Most people, if they have any memory of
that movie at all, recall that the male cows on its untended farm full of
"party animals" have udders. Now, I'm actually willing to forgive the bull
udders as some sort of bizarre, whimsical, Gary Larson-esque touch. Here's what
I found unforgivable in Barnyard: These udder-bulls produce nothing; they die and they're buried in the fucking
ground.
No porterhouse steaks. No rump roast. No Grade-Z ground beef for school lunches.
To me, it's unseemly for a film to deny that farms produce the things we eat;
part of growing up a meat-eater is acknowledging that a cow (not unlike the one
voiced by King Of Queens funnyman Kevin James) was hacked up into that Happy Meal you
picked up on the way home from the theater.
Though still a much gentler, lighter film than its
sequel, Babe
opens by dispelling any such illusions. Were it not for divine chance (and his
general runty-ness), our hero might have joined the sows herded onto a meat
truck, which to the naïve eyes of Babe and other pen-dwellers, looks like a
ticket to paradise. As far as they know, the pigs selected to leave the pen are
so happy with their new home that none of them ever come back. From the first
scene, the film is upfront about the fact that bacon, ham, and pork chops come
from the same "wonderful, magical animal," as Homer Simpson once put it. And
though Babe
goes on to tell the story of a pig rescued from delicious destiny through his
unlikely gifts as a sheepdog, it doesn't lie to kids about where he'd otherwise
end up.
As its title makes clear, Babe: Pig In The City leaves the farm for the
more uncertain perils of a sprawling metropolis. Stepping behind the camera
after co-writing (with director Chris Noonan) and producing Babe, Miller sacrifices none
of the hyperkinetic style he brought to the three Mad Max movies and the underrated Lorenzo's Oil,
which made something operatic out of disease-of-the-week material. Seen through
the eyes of his loveable, often Damon Runyon-esque animals, Miller's urban
landscape is an overwhelming, frightening, chaotic, and sometimes cruel place,
and the film makes no attempt to soften it up for the younger set. Off the
farm, these creatures are as lost as the wayward boys sent to "Pleasure Island"
in Pinocchio,
though Miller doesn't manage anything quite as chilling as a curse that
transforms young hoodlums into donkeys. (Though Mickey Rooney as a clown, which
I'll discuss in a bit, comes awfully close.)
Before getting into the manic, dystopian elements
that have given Pig In The City cult status, it should be said that the sprawling
Everycity Miller and his technical wizards have created is extraordinarily
beautiful. Seen from afar, it's a flourishing amalgam of the world's major
city, squeezing in landmarks from the Statue Of Liberty to the Eiffel Tower to
the Golden Gate Bridge to the Sydney Opera House in Miller's native Australia.
The streets have their dark corners, to be sure, but they're also lined with
cobblestone pathways and Venetian canals that sparkle with blue-green water.
Some critics dismissed the film as irredeemably ugly, but in this clip, Babe's
first look at the city provides jaw-dropping evidence to the contrary:
Such moments are parsed out pretty stingily,
however, as Babe and his masters have to overcome all sorts of unfortunate
setbacks. Fresh off their sheep-dogging triumph, Babe and the beloved Farmer
Hoggett (James Cromwell) return to a hero's welcome, but back at the farm,
things go haywire in a hurry. In the first of many inspired, elaborate Rube
Goldberg setpieces that occur throughout the film, Babe tries to help Farmer
Hoggett fix the water pump, but winds up sending his master careening down the
well. With Farmer Hoggett horribly injured and Mrs. Hoggett (Magda Szubanski)
overwhelmed by the task of tending to her ailing husband and the farm, it isn't
long before men in suits come to threaten foreclosure. So as a last-ditch
effort, Mrs. Hoggett decides to capitalize on Babe's sheepherding celebrity by
accepting a lucrative offer for the pig to appear at a mega-fair in the big city.
They barely make it past the airport. A
drug-sniffing beagle, eager to make the pig's acquaintance in baggage holding,
brags about all the rewards he gets for barking next to suitcases. He
demonstrates this by barking on top of Babe's crate, leading authorities to
seize the pig and interrogate poor Mrs. Hoggett as a drug runner. After
subjecting Mrs. Hoggett to certain "procedures"—a word the narrator
emphasizes to suggestive effect—the authorities let them go, but not in
time for them to make the fair. Unable to get a flight back home for a couple
of days, they venture out into a hostile city, finally landing at a hotel that
houses animals in secret.
Moments after they arrive there, Babe and Mrs.
Hoggett are separated, and they don't see each other until the mad climax, when
she tries to bungee him away from his captors. And though Miller follows the
apple-cheeked matron's horrifying odyssey—in which she searches for the
pig in some hellish Hollywood back lot and ends up getting arrested with a
bucket of glue on her head—he mostly sticks with Babe, and the
orphaned urban animal kingdom that eventually rallies around him. With them,
Miller offers the children in the audience a scary fantasy: How would they get
along in the big city without adults around? How would they feed themselves?
What's the pecking order? Who would tell them what to do?
Babe: Pig In The City doesn't turn into a
kid-friendly Lord Of The Flies or anything, but it does tap into children's
primal fears of getting separated from their parents, or worse still, being
controlled by adults who don't have their best interests in mind. Which brings
us to Mickey Rooney, who puts in a brief but scarring appearance as a clown
(with what appears to be a vomit-encrusted mouth) who abducts Babe and makes
him a part of his act. Appearing at children's events under the name "The
Fabulous Flooms And Their Amazing Apes," Rooney brings Babe into a comic
routine that also involves a family of chimpanzees and an avuncular orangutan.
When Babe accidentally disrupts Rooney in the middle of his cannonball bit, the
result is the stuff of impeccably choreographed nightmares:
It never occurred to me that sequences like the
one above—and the others like it in Babe: Pig In The City—cross the line of
good taste or are somehow too disturbing for children, perhaps because I
believe that kids are made of sterner stuff. After all, many generations have
survived the Brothers Grimm, anthologists of the darkest and most enduring fairy tales,
so surely today's can survive a film that looks tame by comparison. Besides,
whenever Pig In The City seems unremittingly bleak, there's always Babe himself, the
sweet-natured, peace-loving pig who can move sheep and other animals through
gentle persuasion. Placed in a hostile environment, Babe succeeds as a leader
by turning the other cheek: Whether it's with the apes, who have no qualms
about roping him into Rooney's act (one of them, voiced by Steven Wright, has
my favorite line in the film: "We're in a negotiation with this naked pink
individual"), or the savage bull terrier who thinks he has "an official obligation
to be malicious." At the end of a bravura chase scene involving the bull terrier,
Babe sees his life flash before his eyes and suddenly decides to stick to principle.
Here's that moment, rendered in a series of flashcuts that reminded me a little
of Don't Look Now
(which, coincidentally, also featured Venetian canals):
Babe's heroic act has such a transformative effect
on the other animals that the tone of the film shifts to the positive. "Maybe
dogs and cats should, you know, be nicer to each other," he suggests, and from
then on, the city doesn't seem so cruel. Yes, the film is still hyperkinetic,
with a couple of action sequences that play like Miller's homage to his own The
Road Warrior.
And yes, it closes with a bungee-jumping finale that's so bizarre and surreal
that even I have trouble defending it. But Pig In The City is ultimately as assuring
as Babe
and other children's films are supposed to be: It's about making friends,
sharing, and getting into mischief and adventures. It just takes a different
route in getting there, one that's currently been sealed off for our kids'
protection.
Coming up:
Next week: They Live
Cult On The Cheap Month
April 3: Clerks
April 10: Primer
April 17: Pi (replacing El Mariachi, which simply doesn't
interest me)