The Australian talking pig takes on Pinocchio in Jakarta
By Jane Freebury
JAKARTA (JP): Two contrasting children's movies are being screened in local theaters to herald the school holidays which started this week. The first is the Oscar-winning Babe, the second is The Adventures of Pinnochio.
Babe is a film about a brave little piglet who changed his destiny and became a prize winner at a country show instead of prime pork on the dinner table. Like the third little pig, Babe's cousin in that other fairy tale The Three Little Pigs, he recognizes what is likely to happen to him i.e. he will be eaten, so he decides to act smart and manages a trick of fate.
It has been rather a long time getting here; this Australian film was first released in December 1995. But on its way here Babe has made a reputation and collected a big prize -- the Oscar for Best Visual Effects at this year's Academy Awards.
Babe is a little runt pig, orphaned early in life when men from the small-goods truck take mother away. He is left alone in the Gothic space of an empty barn. But then he too is scheduled to take a one-way trip to the dinner table when he is won as a prize at a pre-Christmas fair by farmer Hoggett and finds himself in a new home in idyllic countryside.
On Hoggett's farm Babe is adopted by the sheepdog Fly. Through this relationship Babe gets ideas above his station, place and the contents of Mrs Hoggett's Christmas dinner platter -- and looks set to upset the natural order of things as decreed by Rex, Fly's partner and top dog of the farmyard.
But that Christmas it is roast duck, not pork, that sits on the table and it becomes clear that farmer Hoggett, played with a taciturn integrity by James Cromwell, has begun to feel that his pig is someone special. Hoggett sees that Babe is able to herd and sort other farm animals by category and he is impressed with Babe's good sense in raising the alarm when there are men in his field stealing sheep.
With ne'er hardly a word the farmer gives this potential prodigy the opportunity to try sheep herding. When Mrs Hoggett, played with gusto by Magda Szubanski, is away, Babe is offered a place on the rug in front of the fireplace, to the disgust of the household cat. Hoggett then sets about training Babe for the forthcoming sheepdog trials, to the continued disgust of Rex. Poor Rex is ignominiously muzzled and sedated and Babe is on his way to becoming district hero.
Babe is 'a Kennedy Miller production', and is from the same man who brought us that post-apocalyptic vigilante with attitude, Mad Max. Babe co-writer and producer George Miller, who directed Mel Gibson in the Mad Max trilogy, tells of discovering the Dick King-Smith book on which Babe is based while working on the last of his Mad Max films. He bought the book The Sheep Pig in London -- it is an English story, written by a retired Yorkshire farmer -- and knuckled down to developing the screenplay with the film's co-writer and director Chris Noonan. And to solving the technological challenges of presenting a "talking pig", without resorting to full scale Disney-style animation.
Remarkable for its achievement in creating a farmyard full of talking animals, it is also astonishing that Babe was able to find the financial backing it required. Can you imagine going to prospective investors with an idea for a movie about a talking pig? Who wants to be a sheep dog? Who actually wins at the sheep dog trials? By being polite and friendly? Hey no, hold on here!
Investors were found and it was necessary to internationalize the production. It was going to be expensive developing processes to create the illusion of animal dialogue and expression. A method was devised of using live action images of animals intercut with computer generated images of them talking and 'acting'. With its mix of puppetry, animatronics and computer graphics, with constant intercutting into the live action so as to sustain the illusion of the reality, Babe looks pretty convincing...
But the work involved. Animal trainers; Jim Henson's Creature Shop; silicone designers; computer-generated image sculptors; fur, hair, fleece and feather design specialists; fiberglass sub- frame designers and mold makers. Usually I'm not one to note the difficulties a film production faced -- those virtues stressed in the press kits handed out at the media screening -- but in this case Babe's achievements warrant special note, if only to explain how they did it.
The look of the film is in Miller's own words' storybook'. It was shot on location in the southern highlands of New South Wales, Australia, but the farmhouse looks like it's straight out of a fairy tale. Soft-focus cinematography is a key to the consistent look of the film, for all the camera's subjects. Miller recalls that he told his director of photography Andrew Lesnie, "Shoot it as if you are working with Greta Garbo rather than (with) pigs".
It's hard to praise Babe without running the danger of patronizing it. To say it is a children's movie but a film for the child in all of us, to say it is sweet but not cute, to say it is uplifting because everyone still enjoys a fairy tale, might all too faintly praise this very unusual film. It seems to have picked its way surefootedly through a mire of potential pitfalls and survived, like its hero, through integrity and intelligence.