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Babe (voiced by Christine Cavanaugh) is humiliated in his first attempt to control a pen of sheep. Fly (voiced by Miriam Margolyes) tells him that pigs are inferior, which he doesn’t believe. Rex (voiced by Hugo Weaving) feels his honour as a sheepdog has been degraded. The old ewe Maa (voiced by Miriam Flynn) reprimands Babe for trying to be a savage ‘wolf’. She teaches him a more civilised way to communicate with her fellow sheep.
Curator’s notes
The saturated colours and warm tint evident in this clip help create the sense of fairytale or fable in the storytelling. It also removes the story from the more traditional arid looking Australian landscape. The book was English, the film Australian, but the money to make it was American – so it takes place in a world that’s a mixture of all three. The American accents were controversial in Australia and the UK but did not apply uniformly. Mr and Mrs Hoggett retain something of a rustic British-Australian sound, while Rex and Fly are clearly American, as are Babe and Maa. Dick King-Smith wrote the book based partly on his experiences as a failed farmer in Gloucestershire in England. Producer and co-writer George Miller read the book on an international flight and determined immediately to turn it into a film. Director Chris Noonan had worked with Kennedy-Miller on two of their highly successful mini-series in the 1980s – as a writer and director on The Cowra Breakout (1984) and Vietnam (1988). He did not make another film for 11 years after Babe, until Miss Potter in 2006.
The theme of Babe is partly that tolerance and creativity are linked, as in this scene. Babe finds a new way to herd sheep, by responding to his own nature, rather than the instructions of his new mother Fly, who believes, as a dog must, that sheep are inferior. Even so, Fly is much more flexible than Rex, whose status is bound up in the hierarchies of the farmyard. Tradition, in Rex’s example, is anti-creative and hidebound. Dr George Miller has long been interested in the process of creativity, a theme that’s explored further in his Oscar-winning computer animation Happy Feet (2006). Both films are about young heroes who challenge the status quo to find their creativity, be it tap-dancing or sheep-herding. Miller began his career making films that challenged the status quo in Australian film. Mad Max was far from respectable in 1979, when most Australian movies were more polite and funded by Australian taxpayers (which Mad Max (1979) was not). In that sense there’s an element of autobiography in both Babe and Happy Feet (2006), and a message to young people to find their own creativity by questioning tradition.
