Mad Max: Fury Road director George Miller made a parable that still resonates today. Not just a kid’s movie, the story of Babe and his talking animal friends deals in both hope and regret. It’s a surprise 20 years later.
A deep melancholy lies at the heart of Babe: Pig in the City, and is felt by all of the film’s many human and animal characters — even the ever-optimistic pig. Now 20 years old, George Miller’s idiosyncratic tale still carries the emotional heft that audiences turned away from in 1998. This was not the “kid’s movie” anyone was expecting.
But the film’s sometimes overwhelming atmosphere of regret is tempered by hope: no matter the wrongs we’ve caused, Miller suggests, it’s always possible to redeem ourselves with thought and kindness.
Pig In The City finds Babe — the “sheep-pig” that could do no wrong — committing what in any family film would amount to an atrocity. The pig’s attempt to help Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) repair his well pump lands Hoggett in traction, a likely horrifying sight for young viewers. That action sets off a plot that takes Babe to the city of Metropolis, but the bulk of Pig in the City is devoted to a series of rich and emotional B-stories about regret, spider-webbing out from Babe’s own atonement.
Hoggett doesn’t blame the pig for his accident, but Babe blames himself. As the ironic refrain of “non, je ne regrette rien” recurs on the soundtrack, Babe amasses sadness and guilt. But he doesn’t dwell on or beat himself up over it. The pig simply sets about righting as many wrongs as he can. He’s barely aware of the situation with Hoggett’s wife Esme (Magda Szubanski), the bank and lapsed rent payments at the farm, but he can see the injustice and unfairness in front of him in Metropolis.
Babe comes to the city accompanied by a cloud of guilt, though he’s not the only animal on the block with demons to face. Metropolis is a hostile place, full of angry punks, bullying police, crazed gun nuts and animal-hating bourgeoisie. Nearly everyone has some hurt in their past — either hurt visited upon them, or worse, hurt they’ve caused.
One incident has enormous emotional repercussions for both Babe and the apes he meets in the tiny hotel around which the film revolves. In one the film’s many Rube Goldberg-esque ballets of chaos, Babe takes part in a clown show at a children’s hospital, but accidentally causes a disaster, doing ruinous damage to the set, the hospital, and Fugly Floom (Mickey Rooney). Later, in the film’s finale, Babe disrupts a fundraising event for the very hospital he nearly burned down earlier on.
Babe is arguably to blame, and he immediately understands the gravity of what he’s done, but it’s orangutan Thelonius who most directly takes on the guilt of his eventual death.
