Director – Chris Noonan – 1995 – Australia – Cert. PG (2025), U (1995) – 92m
The story of a sheep that thinks it’s a dog – back in cinemas 30 years later on Friday, April 11th 2025, with a higher BBFC classification rating. The below is my review from What’s On in London in 1995, where I badgered my editor to make it the Film of the Week.
The very different worlds of Gloucestershire-born children’s author Dick King-Smith and Australian production company Kennedy Miller (Mad Max, George Miller, 1979; The Year My Voice Broke, John Duigan, 1987; Dead Calm, Phillip Noyce, 1989) might appear to have little in common. Then along comes Babe, a Kennedy-Miller adaptation of King-Smith’s hilarious fable The Sheep-Pig in which Farmer Hogget’s sole piglet Babe decides to become a sheepdog. Although the book is a very fine (and highly recommended) example of the children’s book, it’s hardly groundbreaking – we’ve read tales about talking animals before. For that matter, too, we’ve seen films with talking animals before – many of the better ones made by Disney.
What we haven’t seen before is this conceit pulled off flawlessly in live action. Until Babe, that is, which surely deserves to go down in the annals of film history alongside such groundbreaking efforts as King Kong (Merian C. Cooper, Ernest B. Shoedsack, 1933), Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977), Who Framed Roger Rabbit (Robert Zemeckis, 1988) and even (when you stop and think about it) Jurassic Park (Steven Spielberg, 1993). It has a better script than (at least) the last three – and it isn’t even American!
Nor does the movie shirk from such difficult King-Smith passages as where the farmer points his gun barrel at the pig he (wrongly) believes to have worried some sheep; the screen version even manages to tackle additional, darker material not found in the book by motivating Babe’s progression towards Sheep-Pigdom out of his ever-present fear of the butcher’s hook.
This remarkable Australian coup is pulled off with a mix of real animals and animatronics, the latter courtesy of various effects houses, including Jim Henson’s much-lauded Creature Workshop. Fine performances from James Cromwell and Magda Szubanski (as Farmer and Mrs. Hoggett, scripted with an inexplicable extra ‘t’) and a sterling voice cast (including Christine Cavanaugh as Babe, plus Hugo Weaving and Miriam Margolyes) don’t do any harm either. Yet it’s really the animals – or rather the filmmakers’ manipulation of them and their special effects counterparts within a well-told story – that steals the show. A masterpiece and (a rare double, this) genuine fun for both sexes and all ages.
The film went on to win the Oscar for Best Visual Effects at the 1995-96 Academy Awards.
Babe is back out in cinemas in the UK on Friday, April 11th 2025.
Trailer: