Babe: Pig in the City (1998)

George Miller's 1998 sequel arrives with a somber, damp-eyed grandeur that its predecessor only hinted at, and it remains a strange artifact: a children's film in which a pig nearly drowns, a clown act collapses into chaos, and the city itself looms like a threat. The farm mortgage plot sets Esme Hoggett to work, and she does carry the rescue machinery on her back with a grim competence. That is a female lead doing the labor, not a thesis about it. Nobody in this film stops to explain what Esme's burden signifies, and the picture is better for the silence.

The animal cast is a menagerie of strays, chimps, an orangutan, a disabled terrier, and a bull terrier who reforms after being fished from a canal. Flealick's disability is simply a fact of his body, deployed for jokes and mobility, never for a lesson. Fugly's food coma is played for broad comedy. The exploitation of performing animals and the looming eviction gesture toward sympathy for the dispossessed, though the film never organizes that sympathy into an argument about money or power. It is too busy being odd.

What lingers is the whimsy, dark and unearned by any sermon. Miller builds a fantasy San Francisco of canals and impossible architecture and lets his pig wander through it, and the result asks nothing of the audience except attention. There is no lecture here, no moral accounting, no contemporary grievance dressed in period clothing. Just a talking pig, a hotel full of strays, and a narrator who knows when to stay quiet. The film was a commercial disappointment and has since been reassessed. That reassessment is deserved, and it has nothing to do with virtue.