Babe: Pig in the City

Saw Babe: Pig in the City, the unneeded sequel to the heartwarming film Babe, about a pig who is so dang polite and likable that he becomes a sheep herder by charming the sheep.  In the sequel, we get a strange and bewildering combination of whimsy and despair.  The film opens with the kindly Farmer Hogget breaking every bone in his body.  Without its farmer, the farm starts sliding into debt, so the farmer's wife takes the pig to the big city.

In the big city, the pig and the farmer's wife are immediately separated.  He's stranded in a beautiful hotel that accepts animals.  A perpetually singing chorus of cats, dogs in wheelchairs, and an orangutan in a green velvet suit stalk the halls.  The hotel is next to a Venetian canal but when Babe looks out the window, he sees the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney opera house, and St Basil's cathedral.  It's so overwhelming and magical and beautiful.  It really stands out because the rest of the film has starving animals and downing dogs.

The film is everything at once.  There's a lot of grim, sensitive stuff, a lot that's clumsy and exactly the kind of horrible kiddy-fare you'd expect, but a lot that's strangely moving.  This is not a good film except in snatches.  It's got a dark sense of humor and is broad and ugly and dumb-silly and clumsy.  There's a moment where the orangutan gives Babe his approval and the soundtrack goes nuts and I was just thinking 'when did we establish that Babe cared about his approval at all?'  The ending especially, you need have drunk enough by that point to stomach.

It's a very strange film.  Too ineptly and arbitrarily built to be good, but too imaginative and wild to be bad.  If you can handle a bad kid's film, it's well worth the watch.