In a classic episode of The Twilight Zone, Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, a passenger flying on a commercial airliner is in the throes of panic. He sees a gremlin on the wing of the aeroplane – an ugly, ghoulish, otherworldly thing and it’s messing with one of the engines.
Every time the man alerts somebody to its existence the monster disappears from view. The people around him assume he’s crazy. He naturally wonders: what’s wrong with everybody?
Moviegoers sometimes feel like that person at 20,000 feet. When we watch a film we love (or even one we hate) but others tend to view it differently we ask ourselves: how can they not see what I see?
For a long time I felt that way in relation to George Miller’s 1998 film Babe: Pig in the City – a brilliant, grotesquely underrated family film criticised at the time of its release for being too dark for young audiences. Miller, by the way, remade Nightmare at 20,000 Feet in a 1983 anthology movie produced by Steven Spielberg and John Landis. He’s been capturing gremlins for years.
Set in a gorgeously stylised composite city (landmarks such as Sydney Opera House, the Statue of Liberty and Eiffel Tower appear in the same shot) Pig in the City is also, like not one but two of the director’s other films, an example of a sequel that reinvents the original storyline rather than simply extending it.
The film is currently sitting on a measly 62% Rotten Tomatoes approval rating. It is rarely mentioned in the zeitgeist, outside of occasional jokes. It was also a big commercial disappointment. While the original grossed more than quarter of a billion dollars internationally, Pig in the City earned less than US$70m (with a reported production budget of US$90m). It seems like nobody, to borrow parlance from the film, thanked the pig.
But I discovered I was not entirely alone in my adoration. Robert Ebert gave the film a perfect rating. Gene Siskel called it “the best movie of the year”. The Chicago Reader’s critic wrote: “Sorry Mad Max fans, but it’s George Miller’s masterpiece.” So there you go: others can see the gremlin.
Picking up where the storyline of its heart-warming predecessor left off, Babe returns home a bona fide champion sheepherder but the Hoggett farm is in trouble. Two men from the bank “with pale faces and soulless eyes” (so says the sagely sardonic narrator, a treat in both films) are threatening eviction.
With Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) incapacitated due to a nasty fall, Esme (Magda Szubanski) and that loveable titular pork chop (voice of Elizabeth Daily) fly overseas intending to enter another sheepherding competition. Instead, when they land at the airport a misunderstanding turns Esme into a drug suspect and leads to a rubber-glove encounter with security.
They become stranded in Metropolis, a bustling place with mismatched architecture and Vienna-like streets. Animals, acting as symbolic stand-ins for asylum seekers, are ostracised and on the fringes of society. A bunch of them live a secluded existence at a hotel run by a sympathetic owner.
These characters are a motley lot, among the most eclectic of any talking animal picture. They include a Blanche DuBois-esque pink poodle (strongly implied to be a former sex worker), a pregnant chimp and her wise guy-like husband, an impeccably well-dressed but embittered orangutan and a disabled Jack Russell, to name only a few.
The film’s visual effects are wonderful, at times breathtaking – the sort of achievements that continually provoke the question “how did they do that?” On this subject very little exists (nothing of substance on either the DVD or Blu-ray).
Written by Miller, Judy Morris and Mark Lamprell, the screenplay is darkly satirical and joyfully absurd, drawing light and dark elements into rousingly profound moments.
There’s a sequence where the unflappably noble Babe rescues a mean dog from drowning. It arrives replete with acid-like flashbacks to the protagonist as a piglet sucking on his mother’s teat; the moment plays like David Lynch got his hands on a copy of Milo and Otis.
It is a gobsmacking scene, among the most magical and memorable conjured in any Australian film from the 1990s – up there with Priscilla’s raucous desert rendition of I Will Survive and the instrument-overboard climax in The Piano.
It was also one of several scenes in the film that proved contentious. In a review headlined “much too dark and cruel for kids” critic Peter Stack seemed to sum up the mood. He wrote: “Do we want to witness a dog, even such a maligned breed as the pit bull, get cruelly snagged by his chain, hang from a bridge and dangle underwater for so long that viewers think he has expired like a felon twitching on the gallows?”
When a conversation I had with James Cromwell in 2013 ventured into Pig in the City territory – as any decent film conversation, of course, does – the actor said its dark elements arose from an idea that “you took the family to see the first film and left the kids at home for the second”.
That logic struck me as so strange I had to clarify it with Miller himself. “There was some element of that, but it wasn’t specifically about leaving the kids at home. That wasn’t a driving logic,” the director told me last year. He said Pinocchio, another dark family film, was his favourite movie of all time, and that “these stories are for the adult in the child and the child in the adult”.
Perhaps that is why, being neither a child nor really an adult when I saw Pig in the City for the first time, it didn’t make a big impact. And perhaps all the tut-tutting about the film being supposedly too dark for kids played a part in obscuring some phenomenal work – including Roger Ford’s production design and cinematography by the late and great Andrew Lesnie.
Could Pig in the City be the most under-appreciated Australian film in history? I can see the gremlin on the wing right now, and it’s nodding its head.
