Babe* (1995)

Here is one of those rare children’s / family films that just nails it. It’s cute but not sappy, simple but not stupid, and heartwarming without inducing your gag reflex. I don’t know that it deserved to be nominated for Best Picture, but Babe is a charming little puff piece that hasn’t lost much, if any, of its magic over the last two decades.

The runt of the litter and unwanted by his pork farm owners, he is offered up as the prize for a weight-guessing game at a local carnival. After guessing correctly, Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell) brings him home to his small countryside farm. Some of the barnyard and household animals embrace him while others want nothing to do with him. Adopted by a family of sheep dogs, Babe’s spunk and desire to take up the “family” business catches the eye of Farmer Hoggett, leading him to defy convention and risk humiliation by registering Babe in a sheep-herding contest.

Live-action movies with talking animals strike me as risky business. You can do anything you want with animation, and there is a lot of leeway when the film is just about talking animals. Films like Babe, which set talking animals against a very real-world setting including humans have to be done just right. The animals have to act like animals and they can’t be too smart or the humans too dumb. Credit is due both the filmmakers and undoubtedly the author of the book the film is based on for fashioning a slate of animal and human characters that walk this tightrope act with ease.

Plain and simple, films like this live and die by the animal performances. To bring this film to life, the director, cinematographer, and animal trainers all have to be on the same page. The animals hit their marks (though I can imagine multiple takes required for each scene) and the cinematography captures the animal movements from angles and in lighting that complete the illusion.

Praise is also due to the people behind giving voices to the animal characters. All of the voice characterizations are terrific because the voice textures blend with the animal actions in such a way that you have no problem believing that these animals actually possess the personalities being expressed. The visual effects department also does a flawless job of making each animal look as if it is actually delivering the lines without defying animal anatomy. Between subtle mouth movements via animatronics in production and computer effects in post-production, the filmmakers make talking animals look plausible, eliminating most of the objections our brains would normally raise.

I think the only thing in this film that dates it is when Farmer Hoggett and his wife receive a fax machine as a gift to help keep in touch with their city-dwelling children and grandkids. Otherwise the film exists within a world insulated from changes in fashion and culture. You can watch Babe today and still presume it to be set at a modern quaint off-the-beaten-path English farm whose owners eschew fancy technology. Its setting is as close to timeless as you can hope for in a family friendly film and it comes with a whole lot of charm. This will be one to share with the kids and grandkids someday.

RATING: 3.75 out of 5

Atlantis: The Lost Empire (2001)

Here is Disney’s first true post-Renaissance misfire. While it has plenty of promising elements and interesting ideas to its credit, Atlantis: The Lost Empire is not a well-oiled machine. For some strange reason its components do not play well together. It may sound like I am about to come down harsh on this film but please know that I was left disappointed after rooting for it to right itself for most of its runtime.

In 1914, millennia after Atlantis sank into the ocean, Milo Thatch (Michael J. Fox), an overzealous Atlantis researcher at the Smithsonian Institution, believes he has discovered an ancient manuscript that will point the way to the lost civilization. Enter an eccentric millionaire friend of Milo’s grandfather who already has the manuscript and needs Milo to interpret the ancient Atlantean language to lead a crew, already waiting in port no less, for a grand adventure. While Milo is going purely for scientific discovery, upon arriving at the fabled kingdom, he learns that others have ulterior motives for making the trek.

Maybe I’m finally being too nitpicky with a children’s movie but there are a number of things that just don’t make sense in this film. The Atlantean people, culture, and history is interesting but do you really expect me to believe that Kida and her people can understand English because it shares a common root with the Atlantean language? That would be like expecting me to be able to understand Hindi because it stems from the Indo-European language tree. Also, how are some of the characters such renowned explorers if they are so prone to making bad decisions? How exactly have the Atlanteans survived with little to no air filtration in their subterranean rock bubble? And who built the robotic lobster that guards the entrance to Atlantis anyway? It couldn’t have been the Atlanteans.

Perhaps it’s the specific mixture of fantasy and realism attempted by the filmmakers that holds me up. Perhaps if this had been a book written in the 19th or early 20th century it would be easier to swallow. But this is an original tale gushing with rich fantasy elements that totally overpower the lost-world fantasy sub-genre construct. We’re used to the discoverers being more advanced than the lost civilization. I don’t mind turning the tables on convention (and legend almost requires Atlantis to be advanced) but I think Disney’s team went a little too far with it to the point that it’s hard to buy into.

A clunky and muddled story don’t help matters much either. After growing up on Indiana Jones, the whole scientific idealism vs. greed/power conflict doesn’t feel fresh. Atlantis also plays its cards close to the vest for too long. Secrets about Atlantis’s power, technology, and history are kept from audiences and the film’s characters until the eleventh hour and only in order to prevent calamity. Don’t ask your audience to process a huge amount of information late in the game like this. Had the filmmakers revealed a little bit at a time throughout the film, then a lot of things would have made more sense and would have actually added more tension to unfolding events because we would know at least a little about the stakes involved.

For all the good things at work in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, there are an equal amount of things that either work too hard or not hard enough. This results in the film feeling unbalanced. If you can keep everything straight in your head until all the secrets are revealed, you probably think my review is silly. Otherwise, you are probably like me and see a lot of potential for an old-school discovery adventure. It’s a shame that this film couldn’t hold it together because it could have marked a bold new direction for Disney to explore.

RATING: 2.75 out of 5

12 Monkeys (1995)

This is what happens when you let an eclectic filmmaker fully realize his vision for a project that inspires him. Daring, jarring, and unsettling as it is, there is a strange beauty in 12 Monkeys that is hard to pin down. It features excellent performances by Bruce Willis and Brad Pitt and makes up for a lack of flashy sci-fi effects by being chock full of nerdy, intellectual talking points.

In the year 2038, inmate James Cole (Bruce Willis) is offered a chance at parole. In exchange for his freedom, he must help subject himself to crude time travel technology and help government scientists research the outbreak of a virus that decimated the world’s population and sent all survivors underground to avoid contamination. While in the past, Cole teams up with a psychiatrist (Madeline Stowe) and attempts to shed light on Jeffrey Goines (Brad Pitt) and his Army of the Twelve Monkeys, the group believed responsible for the virus’s release in 1996.

For me, it all starts with the story. If a film doesn’t have anything original to say or a unique spin on a concept or idea we’ve seen before, then it is already running behind. Hard core sci-fi nerds know that this film takes the same premise as French short film called Le Jetée but adds additional details and conflicts to bring it to full feature length. Audiences must digest issues like causality, mental instability, and radical environmentalism.

One thing viewers don’t get much time to think about is time travel itself. Tackling this subject is no easy task but the filmmakers treat it with care and respect. I appreciate the lack of a technological explanation. Being told that time travel exists and being forced to just go with it help to suspend disbelief. Sure, we inevitably ask ‘how?’ but I would much rather wonder about how it’s done than to mentally dissect and judge the acceptability of the filmmakers’ explanation of how it’s done. It’s more sleight of hand than movie magic but it’s effective all the same.

And really, 12 Monkeys is not a film about time travel. Time travel, though vital to the story, is just a tool used to tell the tale of a troubled man trying to earn his freedom by saving the world. Bruce Willis nails his role as a tormented lab rat. The world Cole returns to is both foreign and familiar. Cole has been in prison and surrounded by enough post-outbreak technology for enough time to find the world of his childhood memories confusing and alarming at times. Though my own acting experience is quite limited, I know that confusion is a very difficult emotion to convincingly portray; it is easy to overdo and under-do and audiences can typically spot when you’re doing it wrong.

The other standout performance in this film is Brad Pitt’s unstable and unhinged Jeffrey Goines. I don’t know where he pulled from to bring this character to life but it is nothing short of amazing. The physicality of Goines mannerisms, from his spastic outbursts down to his wild and contorted stare, is enough to make you feel tired just watching it. Madeline Stowe is stuck with the weakest of the three main characters but she carries her weight well enough. She conveys a different but equally effective form of confusion as she tries to figure out who Cole is and what he’s dragging her into.

Even more interesting is that director Terry Gilliam manages to share Cole’s sense of confusion with the audience. Through a number of tricks with lighting, camera angle, and his choice of camera and lens to take the shot, Gilliam finds clever and subtle ways to make the familiar feel bizarre. It disorients us slightly and helps increase our empathy for Cole. Gilliam also uses restraint in keeping the future looking just futuristic enough yet composed of technology left over from the pre-virus era. Some of the future set decorations don’t quite fit or even seem too strange but the overall effect works well.

I will always have a soft spot for intelligent cinema, especially intelligent sci-fi. This film is abundant with talking points but it isn’t too smart for its own good. Some filmmakers go overboard in an attempt to make themselves look intellectually superior (Matrix Reloaded anybody?) but you can watch 12 Monkeys at face value and still enjoy the ride. That comes from a careful mix of indulgence and restraint that is a real gift to cinema when balanced just right.

12 Monkeys is depressing yet hopeful, convoluted yet captivating. The fantasy of time travel mixes with the realities of dissidence and terrorism in ways that entertain but also hit close to home. This is a film that is watchable in its own right and worth repeat viewings simply for the thrill of seeing how it unfolds. It is also the kind of film that could launch you into a night-long conversation about all kinds of heady topics. The choice is yours. Either way, it is entirely worth it.

RATING: 4 out of 5