Babe at 30: why this much-loved film is one of the best cinematic translations of a children’s book

This spring, Babe is returning to cinemas to mark the 30th anniversary of its release in 1995. The much-loved family film tells the deceptively simple but emotionally powerful story of a piglet who saves his bacon through intelligence, kindness and hard work.

Babe becomes the trusted ally of both farmer and farmyard animals and, like so many Hollywood heroes before and since, he refuses to stay in his lane.

It’s a film which, on paper, really shouldn’t work and which sounds alarm bells to any self-respecting children’s literature scholar like me. It takes an expertly crafted English children’s book with tasteful black-and-white illustrations – Dick King-Smith’s The Sheep Pig (1983) – and turns it into an all-singing, all-dancing technicolour extravaganza.

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The film inserts new episodes and characters – an evil cat, a plucky duck and (most alarmingly) a brace of brattish kids. And it replaces a perfectly good, does-what-it-says-on-the-tin book title with the cutesy moniker of the piglet star.

It shouldn’t work … but it really, really does. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that it’s one of the most successful film adaptations of a children’s book of all time.

It met with both commercial and critical success, making over US$254 million at the box office and being nominated for no less than seven Academy Awards, one of which it secured for visual effects.

So, what exactly is so special about Babe? It was one of the first films which, thanks to the then-cutting edge combination of animatronics and visual effects, delivered convincing talking animals who, endowed with the gift of speech, could themselves “look like movie stars”. But with all the jaw-dropping technological advances of the last 30 years, how has this film managed to stand the test of time so well?

The answer in part is that its source material is exceptionally strong. The Sheep Pig is written with restraint and economy, but also great warmth and relish. King-Smith has immense fun, wallowing in words like the proverbial pig in muck, and putting it all to the service of a story whose core values are easy to get behind. The Sheep Pig is a soft-power parable which advocates for brains over brawn, for respectful communication and common decency.

But the excellence of a film’s bookish bedrock is no guarantee of success. Indeed, the brilliance of a book can often be something of a liability. Think of Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland, or any of the film and TV adaptations of Noel Streatfeild’s superb Ballet Shoes. With Babe, though, the book is catalyst rather than straitjacket, an enabling prompt which initiates a new work of equal strength and quality.

The pacing is well judged, the look of the film lush, and there are several actual laugh-out-loud moments – including the duck’s panicked realisation that “Christmas means carnage!” Above all, it’s a film with immense emotional intelligence and power.

Recognised for its visual effects, it also succeeds in large part because of the strength of its soundscape and score. There’s one scene in particular which really soars, and which takes on the elephant in the room: the human habit of eating pigs.

Babe is so shocked and upset on learning this fact from the evil cat (who else?) that he loses the will not just to win in the sheepdog trial, but to live at all. The supremely taciturn Father Hoggett must act to make amends and save his pig protégé.

In an astonishingly moving act of love, this man of few words takes the sickly and sick-at-heart pig onto his lap and sings to him. At first a gentle crooning, the farmer’s expression of care and affection soon swells to an out-and-out bellow, accompanied by a wild, caution-to-the-wind dance.

It’s difficult to imagine a more lyrically apt song than the 1977 reggae-inflected hit based on the powerful tune of Camille Saint-Saëns’ Symphony No. 3 in C Minor: “If I had words”, it begins. It’s a moment of huge emotional force and intensity, in which the gaping abyss of age and species difference are bridged through music and dance.

James Cromwell as Farmer Hoggett, here and throughout the film, is tremendous, his reserved performance a key factor in its success. The role – which he almost didn’t take because of the paucity of lines – was career-defining, and prompted personal epiphanies which flow naturally from this scene.

First, Cromwell never ate meat again. Second, he has spoken (with visible emotion) of the delivery of the film’s final pithy-but-powerful line of approbation – “That’ll do pig, that’ll do” – as a moment of communion with his father on catching sight of his own artificially aged reflection in the camera lens. “My life changed, and I owe it to a pig,” the actor concludes.

Babe is a film and an adaptation with many qualities. It’s wholesome without ever being sickly. But above all, it has an emotional force which worked on actors and audiences alike and which, 30 years later, remains undiminished.

Kiera Vaclavik does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.