Babe – 1995
Dear God. Oh, dear God. Please don’t make me ever have to watch this movie again. I am ashamed that this was nominated for Best Picture. I haven’t watched such a horrible piece of swill since watching the 1931 nominee Skippy. I kept wanting to stop the movie and turn it off, but I forced myself to watch it through to the very end. I have often said that the cardinal sin of movie making is that cute for the sake of cute is never cute. NEVER. Every now and then a movie will break this most sacred of rules, but usually in a fairly minor way. They will have a nice enough movie but they would throw in an adorable little kid whose only purpose is to look cute and pull at the heartstrings of people who love children. These are the same people who squeal at the thought of baby animals. Well, that is exactly what this entire movie is based on.
Babe is geared towards a 4 or 5 year old audience. The story is ridiculously moronic. The characters are formulaic, the special effects were barely passable, humor was juvenile, the music was often tantamount to what you might hear playing over the crib of an infant, and the plot’s resolution was so fake and fabricated, I wanted to bang my head against a wall. But all that being said, I get it. Those are often the earmarks of a good children’s movie. And as a children’s movie, it was just fine. It catered expertly to the simplistic minds and emotions of its young audience. But then, why would such a piece of mindless tripe be nominated for the coveted Best Picture award? I’ll be honest. I don’t know.
So, Babe is the story of a pig who wanted to be a sheep-dog. The moral messages of the movie are actually excellent ones that say, don’t let society tell you what you can or cannot be. Always be true to yourself, whatever that means. It also teaches that you shouldn’t mindlessly believe in stereotypes. And more, it says that you will have a better chance getting people to work with you if you use kindness and cooperation rather than force. All good lessons for children to learn. The trick is, I’m an adult. I learned those lessons a long time ago.
The first 5 minutes of the movie showed the piglet in a nasty and dark pig farm as his mother is taken away from him. He stands at the gate and watches her go. With tears in his eyes, he says with the voice of a 4 year old, “Goodbye, Mom,” knowing he’ll never see her again. After that, different chapters of the film were shown by title cards that were read by field mice with high pitched voices like the Chipmunk cartoons. And a narrator with a kindly voice moves the story along as if he is reading a fairy-tale.
Fortune puts him on the farm of Farmer Hoggett, played by James Cromwell and his fat, annoying wife, played by Magda Szubanski. The first time Babe meets Farmer Hoggett, he pees on his shoes. Funny and cute at the same time… right? And during Babe’s first night alone in Hoggett’s barn, he cries, saying, “I want my mom!” Ugh. As the only pig on the farm, Babe is taken in by the dogs, Fly and her gruff husband Rex, who teach him that sheep are stupid, and that all the varied animals of the farm have to know their places. But when Babe takes an opportunity to save many of Farmer Hoggett’s sheep from livestock thieves, the farmer takes notice of him and he is trained as a sheep dog. This sets up conflict between him and Rex, who is getting to old to do his job. Babe talks to the sheep, and politely asks them to go into their pens. And they obey him because he saved them from being snatched. And later Babe saves them from being eaten by wild dogs, too. OK, that’s not too bad.
But it was the ridiculous ending that really had me rolling my eyes. Farmer Hoggett enters Babe into a national sheep-herding contest, but the competition sheep don’t know him and won’t listen to him. So Rex runs back to the farmer’s sheep and tries being nice to them for a change. He asks them for help to get the other sheep to listen to Babe. For the kindly Babe’s sake, they give him a sacred password that all sheep know. Rex gives Babe this secret password which the pig tells to the competition sheep. Like magic, the sheep calmly walk through the contest obstacle course, going exactly where Babe politely asks them to go. Meanwhile, the competition judges who had been laughing at Farmer Hoggett for entering a pig into a sheep-herding contest, give Babe perfect scores across the board. The crowd cheers wildly and Babe basks in the glory of his master’s approval. The end.
Really? REALLY?? A magic sheep password? Stick a fork in me. I’m done. But I also have to make mention of the sub-par special effects. You see, the talking animal effects were accomplished by Rhythm & Hues Studios and Jim Henson’s Creature Workshop. And we got what you might expect. Whenever any of the animals changed from live to animatronic, it was painfully obvious. The jerky and unnatural movements, the phony mouth pieces to simulate speech, and the fact that they were suddenly, oddly stationary whenever they were shown speaking. All this is perfectly acceptable for a children’s movie, but nowhere close to a Best Picture nominee. And it won the Oscar for Best Special Effects, beating Apollo 13! Shame on you Academy of Motion Picture and Arts Sciences! Shame!