I Fear ‘Babe: Pig In The City’ As Much As I Love It

There are lots of children’s films that don’t feel like they were made for children. Think of Return to Oz, with its nightmare-inducing Wheelers, or Coraline and its fixation on doppelgängers and fakes.

But there are not many children’s films that feel like they were made for no human being currently living on the planet. Babe: Pig in the City is such a film.

The first Babe is a simple, bucolic affair — charming in its directness. There’s this pig, and he knows how to talk to other animals! There are some singing mice! At the end, the grizzled farmer with the heart of gold tells the pig that he’s done a good job!

Done and dusted. Kids love the animal shit; parents reminisce happily, perhaps with a gentle tear forming in the corner of their eye, about instances in their past where they made their silent totem of a father proud; millions of dollars are made at the box office.

Then there’s the second Babe. The second Babe feels like a fetish object made to satisfy a sexual proclivity that does not yet exist. It feels like, to borrow the words of film critic Nick Pinkerton, some hideous goo scraped off the surface of the human id. It feels, in a word, like an atrocity. And for that reason — for precisely that reason — I love it more than any other film ever made.

I Cannot Begin To Explain Babe: Pig In The City To You

Immanuel Kant, the influential early modern philosopher, described “awe” as the gap between what you can comprehend and what you can’t; that tiny, thrilling space that your rational powers cannot fill in. As such, I can only describe Babe: Pig in the City as awe-inducing. There are elements of the experience of watching Babe: Pig In The City that I simply cannot describe to you. I can only point to that gap — to that place where words fail me.

Don’t get me wrong: I can tell you about the plot, sure. I can explain that it gets grizzled old Farmer Hoggett out of the way early, and teams up the talking pig of the title with Magda Szubanski’s Esme for an adventure that leads through a foreign city, past a motel for animals, and into a final confrontation at a snooty restaurant. I can tell you that, like the first Babe, it contains an array of talking animals. And I can tell you that there are times where it is clearly designed to be funny — where, like a dementia patient recalling an old tune, the film suddenly remembers that its audience is predominantly made of children, and someone falls over.

And I can even tell you about the crazy shit, albeit with the scattered thought patterns of someone trying to recover insights gained on an acid trip. I can patiently explain Babe: Pig in the City‘s centrepiece scene, in which an angry pitbull — the primary antagonist — drowns in a river while hanging upside down, suspended by a chain, watched by a small horde of animals.

I can tell you, trying to ignore the sweat forming on my brow, that there’s an Orangutan named Thelonious who has been so conditioned by his work in the circus that he considers himself naked if he is not dressed in an oversized green suit. And I can unpack, if you’ll ignore the slight tremor in my right eye, that there is a scene set in dog heaven, and that on two separate occasions Babe is saved from a scrape by a secret cabal of pig-faced men in positions of considerable bureaucratic power.

But something is missing from such explanations. The words only go so far. There is something that happens when you watch a pitbull drown to the sounds of overbearing Wagnerian music that goes beyond words; that leaves rational responses behind. You don’t watch Babe: Pig In The City. It happens to you.

What You Think About Babe: Pig In The City Tells Me What You Think About Art

As all of the above probably makes clear, Babe: Pig In The City is an “acquired taste”, which is a way of saying that it is entirely possible to respond to it with feelings of disgust.

It’s not merely that Babe: Pig In The City contains horrific images. A lot of films contain horrific images — there are entire sub-genres that perfect the art of the disturbing. It’s that Babe: Pig In The City seems essentially purposeless in its horrifying nature.

What’s the message? The quest for an answer is futile.

When you watch a Saw film, you understand that there is a filmmaker behind the camera, trying to do something to you; to elicit the sensation of disgust. In Babe: Pig In The City, that direct line of communication has been severed. There doesn’t seem to be a filmmaker behind the camera, or even an intent at all. What’s the message? The quest for an answer is futile. Watching the film is like coming across a message, written in the sand, and then discovering that the words are merely the random scratchings of a crab.

There is no other cinema like this. Whether or not you agree with Roger Ebert’s argument that movies are empathy machines, they at least seem to be machines for character, or plot, or themes.

Not Babe: Pig In The City. To paraphrase filmmaker Noah Baumbach, Babe: Pig In The City is a machine for the delivery of images that seem dredged up from a fever dream you had as a child and can only remember faintly, the edges ever so slightly blurred, that Orangutang in his sad green suit already fading the very moment that you try and put him into words.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.