Babe: Pig in the City

1998

Directed by George Miller

Before we get into it, the standard disclaimer applies: everything below is my own opinion, shaped by my own viewing experience, and none of it is meant as a knock on anyone who genuinely enjoys this movie. If you grew up with Babe: Pig in the City and it holds a soft spot for you, that’s completely fair. I’m not here to take that away from you. I’m just here to explain why it lands at number 16 on my list.

I want to start this one a little differently than usual, because Babe: Pig in the City is not the kind of disappointment I’m used to writing about. Most movies on this countdown earn their spot through some mix of bad writing, lazy execution, or a studio note that gutted something promising. This one is different. This one was beloved by some of the most respected film critics of its era. Roger Ebert gave it four stars out of four and said flatly that he liked it more than the original, for reasons that had nothing to do with the usual reasons. Gene Siskel placed it at the very top of what would tragically turn out to be his final annual top ten list before his death in 1999. Tom Waits has called it one of his all-time favorite films, the kind of thing he’ll watch on a moment’s notice even as his own kids groan about it. The movie has a real, durable cult following, and I understand exactly why.

I just don’t share it. And the reason I don’t is the same reason some of those critics loved it: this is a movie that cannot decide what kind of film it wants to be, and that indecision is the whole experience of watching it.

What Came Before

To understand why Pig in the City throws me as much as it does, you have to start with the original. Chris Noonan’s Babe came out in 1995, adapted from Dick King-Smith’s novel The Sheep-Pig, and it told a small, gentle story about an orphaned piglet who wants to be a sheepdog. James Cromwell played Farmer Hoggett with a quiet warmth that earned him an Oscar nomination, Magda Szubanski played his wife Esme, and the film built its world around kindness as an actual narrative engine rather than a sentimental backdrop. It earned seven Academy Award nominations including Best Picture and Best Director, took home the Oscar for Best Visual Effects, and made roughly $254 million worldwide on a budget of about $30 million. It worked because it trusted a simple premise and never asked the audience to feel more than the story had earned.

That is the film Pig in the City has to live up to, and it makes the choice almost immediately to live up to it by not really trying to be the same kind of movie at all.

A Familiar Setup, A Very Different City

The sequel opens with Babe returning home a hero after the sheepdog trial that closed out the first film, only for a string of mishaps to leave Farmer Hoggett injured and the farm at risk of foreclosure. Esme decides to take Babe to a state fair appearance to earn the money they need, and a chain of bad luck (a falsely alerting airport drug dog, a missed connecting flight, a wrongful arrest) strands the two of them in a sprawling, fantastical city. From there, Babe ends up at the Flealands Hotel, a boarding house for strays run by the kindly Miss Floom, where he falls in with a found family of animals including a pair of chimpanzees, an orangutan named Thelonius, and an anxious Jack Russell terrier named Flealick. What follows is a chain of rescues, captures, and reunions that eventually brings Esme and Babe back home with the farm saved.

On paper, that’s a perfectly serviceable sequel structure. A road trip movie with an ensemble of new characters and a fish-out-of-water hero is a workable idea. The trouble is in the execution, and specifically in how wildly the tone swings from scene to scene.

This is the part of the movie that critics like Ebert framed as a strength, and I get the argument. He praised it as more of a wonderment than the plot-driven original, full of enchanting images and visual invention. The city itself genuinely is something to see, an impossible skyline that mashes together the Statue of Liberty, the Sydney Opera House, the Eiffel Tower, and the Hollywood sign into one unplaceable metropolis, and there’s real craft in how George Miller builds it. But that same movie also puts a dog through something close to a near-drowning, stages an extended sequence where Babe and the hotel’s animals raid a kitchen while evading capture, and sends its central pig into a moment of genuine peril involving a pack of dogs that plays less like a children’s film and more like something out of a different genre entirely. The film doesn’t transition between these registers so much as it lurches between them, and the whiplash never really settles.

Where the Tone Breaks Down

I think the clearest way to describe what bothers me about Pig in the City is that it never seems to trust its own audience to sit in one emotional space for very long. The original earned its warmth by staying patient. This one wants warmth, wants slapstick, wants peril, and wants melancholy, often within the same five minutes, and it asks the viewer to keep up rather than guiding them through it.

Take the chimpanzee subplot. Bob and Zootie are funny, genuinely funny in places, with Steven Wright and Glenne Headly finding a deadpan rhythm that works as comic relief. But their arc also involves Zootie giving birth mid-crisis and the family unit getting torn apart by animal control, which plays for real emotional stakes a scene or two after they were the broadest comic characters in the film. Thelonius the orangutan exists almost entirely in a register of melancholy dignity, a servant to a cruel owner who finds something like freedom by the end, and his scenes feel like they wandered in from an entirely different, more somber movie. None of these characters are badly conceived. They just don’t seem to be living in the same film as each other.

Mickey Rooney’s Fugly Floom is maybe the best example of the problem in miniature. He’s a broad, almost vaudevillian comic figure, full of slapstick gluttony and exaggerated reactions, and then the film abruptly removes him from the story via a hospitalization that’s played completely straight. The tonal gear shift happens so fast it almost reads as a continuity error rather than a choice.

Even Babe himself isn’t exempt from this. The character who anchored the original through quiet sincerity spends large stretches of the sequel reacting to slapstick chaos around him, then is asked, late in the film, to carry a sequence of legitimate physical danger that plays for real suspense rather than gentle peril. A pig who spent his first movie politely asking sheep to cooperate is, in this one, fighting for his life against a pair of aggressive dogs in a sequence that wouldn’t be out of place in a much harder-edged film. I don’t doubt that Miller wanted that moment to land as a true test of the character’s courage and kindness, the way the original tested those same qualities through gentler means. But the jump from comic setup to genuine menace happens with so little runway that it stops feeling earned and starts feeling like the film reaching for stakes it hasn’t built toward.

I keep coming back to the word whiplash because I don’t think there’s a better one for it. A scene of slapstick at the hotel gives way to a scene of real grief over a captured animal, which gives way to a chase sequence played almost entirely for laughs, which gives way to something genuinely unsettling. Individually, several of these scenes are well made. Strung together without a consistent emotional throughline connecting them, they start to feel less like a story being told and more like a series of tonal experiments the film never resolved into a single coherent voice.

What Actually Works

I don’t want to undersell what the film gets right, because there’s a fair amount of it. Magda Szubanski is doing a lot of heavy lifting as Esme, and she manages to anchor some genuinely difficult tonal pivots with a performance that stays grounded even when the scene around her doesn’t. The visual and practical effects work, particularly in how seamlessly the animal performances are blended with the human cast, is legitimately impressive and holds up well even by today’s standards. The production design of the city itself is its own kind of achievement, an artificial, dreamlike space that doesn’t try to be a real place so much as an idea of every city at once.

And there are individual sequences that land exactly as intended. The early airport detection-dog gag is sharp and economical. The eventual rescue of the captured animals from the pound has real momentum to it. Roscoe Lee Browne’s narration gives the whole thing a storybook quality that, when it’s allowed to breathe, recaptures some of what made the original work. None of this is a poorly made film. It’s a film whose ambition outran its ability to reconcile what it was trying to be.

The Critical Verdict

The contrast between critical and audience reception here is one of the more fascinating split decisions of the era. On Rotten Tomatoes, the film holds a 67 percent approval rating, with the site’s consensus noting it’s not quite as good as the original and carries darker subject matter that might not suit younger viewers. Metacritic places it at 68, in “generally favorable” territory. Audiences surveyed at the time gave it a CinemaScore of B, respectable but a clear step down from the warmth the original generated.

The critical reaction split sharply along lines of taste for ambition versus faithfulness to what came before. Janet Maslin of The New York Times argued the film would only really work for die-hard fans willing to follow Babe anywhere, and suggested that if this version had come first, it never would have spawned a sequel of its own. Empire’s Andrew Collins was harsher still, contrasting the deep-rooted joy of the original against what he called the fidgety depression of the sequel, and awarded it a single star. On the other side, Ebert and Siskel were both outspoken champions, and decades later the film has built the kind of cult reputation that gets it called brilliant and underrated by critics revisiting it with fresh eyes.

It’s worth noting the film’s box office performance never came close to matching that critical divide in its favor. Pig in the City made $69.1 million worldwide on a budget reported around $90 million, a steep drop from the original’s roughly $254 million haul on a fraction of that budget. Ebert himself later wrote that the film’s commercial failure had less to do with audiences disliking it than with audiences simply not seeing it, pointing to a Thanksgiving release date squeezed between bigger family fare and marketing that he felt badly undersold what the movie actually was.

What strikes me most about that critical divide, looking back on it now, is how personal it seems to have been for the people who fell hardest for the film. Siskel didn’t just like Pig in the City. He put it at the top of his very last annual top ten list before his death the following year, which gives that endorsement a weight that’s hard to argue with on a purely critical level. Tom Waits has talked about it as a film he’ll watch with his kids despite their groaning, the kind of love that survives being a running joke in his own household. Those aren’t lukewarm endorsements. Those are the reactions of people who connected with exactly the quality I struggle with, the film’s refusal to stay in one emotional lane, and found in that refusal something closer to ambition than confusion. I respect that read even as I don’t share it.

The Real Disappointment

What lands Babe: Pig in the City at sixteen for me isn’t that it’s badly made, because by almost any technical measure it isn’t. It’s that the film never settles into a consistent emotional logic long enough for me to fully invest in it. I can admire individual sequences, individual performances, individual images, and still come away feeling like I watched three or four different short films stitched together rather than one sustained story.

I understand why this approach has earned the film its defenders. There’s something to be said for a movie willing to be strange and uneven rather than safe and predictable, and the people who love this film tend to love it precisely because it refuses to sit still. I respect that argument even as it doesn’t change my own experience of watching it. The original Babe trusted a quiet, simple story to do its work. The sequel seems to distrust the idea that quiet and simple could ever be enough, and in trying to be everything at once, it never quite settles into being any one thing for long enough to fully land.

Next Time on Movie Monday

Next week we’re leaving the city and the farm behind entirely for the open road, where 2001’s Rat Race sends a busload of desperate strangers careening across the country chasing two million dollars and a premise that mostly exists as an excuse to let its enormous ensemble cast run wild. If Pig in the City suffers from not knowing what kind of movie it wants to be, Rat Race suffers from knowing exactly what kind of movie it wants to be and still not quite pulling it off. Come back next Monday and we’ll get into why.