Thirty years ago, a non-Disney talking-animal adventure became a big movie talking point. Babe, adapted from Dick King-Smith’s children’s book The Sheep-Pig, features an adorable piglet who is rescued from a brutally realistic-looking agribusiness breeding shed as his mum and siblings are taken off to be slaughtered; it is then rehomed in a quaintly old-fashioned farm with lots of different animals, situated in an uncanny-valley landscape of rolling green hills which looks like Olde England but where everyone speaks in an American accent. The lead human is grumpy cap-wearing Farmer Hoggett, played by James Cromwell, later to be hard-faced Captain Dudley Smith in LA Confidential and Prince Philip in Stephen Frears’ film The Queen. The little piglet does his best to fit in and finds his destiny when it looks as if he could be a very talented sheep-herder.
But this is not animation, nor is it precisely live-action. The movie got a (justified) best visual effects Oscar for its mix of animatronics and real animals, modifying their appearance and behaviour onscreen and using CGI for their mouths. It was a startling novelty which was very much of its time. Yet Babe and its innovations didn’t really lead to anything else; they were almost a standalone phenomenon, soon superseded in mainstream family-movie terms by the digital animation of Pixar and Disney’s continuing live-action productions.
Babe is a strange film, for me. The digitally confected moving mouths superimposed on the faces of largely real animals do not convey emotions and moods in the way even a crude animation might; the rest of the animal’s face remains inscrutable and unreadable, and the animals have neither the charm of unadorned reality nor the thoroughgoing ingenuity of animation. And the story itself is a kind of weird anti-Orwell farmyard tale in which the slaughter of animals is a reality central to Babe’s identity crisis, but which is otherwise not part of the film’s world; nor is there much zip to the script. But, shot by the late Andrew Lesnie, cinematographer on the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings films, it always looks good.
• Babe is in UK cinemas from 11 April.
