Chris Noonan
Babe, maialino coraggioso

- That's the way things go

- Well, they go terribly

Much more than an animal fable, much more than a funny comedy with talking animals. This is one of my mother's favorite films, who watches it with eyes full of pure tenderness, like a utopian lullaby. Lulled by the dream of understanding each other.

There is a dreamy lightness surrounding this story, that of someone who hopes and believes in a more beautiful, more just, more dignified world for everyone. An Animal Farm less political and more social, a coming-of-age novel steeped in deceptions, dangers, misunderstandings. A pig that believes it's a dog. Because dogs are the chosen ones, while pigs enter the house only with a side of potatoes.

There is a pyramid scheme of roles that, not by chance, sees Rex at its top, and in parallel Hoggett as the head of the family for the humans. But it's a design destined to unravel, Hoggett's rifle lowers without any specific reason, for a spark of empathy. Babe speaks of a world where those at the top feel compassion for those at the bottom. You can't help but love it.

Moreover, the style is lively and sparkling. Thanks to the ironic division into chapters, the familiar narrative voice, the succinctness of the editing. The themes are tackled with agility, without weighing them down. The bucolic tableau is perfectly rendered: the warm lights, the few iconic objects, the almost caricatural human characters, the use of real animals (48 piglets) with just a few special effects to animate the mouth movements. But here the magic is in natural things, in looking at what is normal (only because we consider it as such) and discovering it to be special, complex, even painful.

Furthermore, to take on that echo of suffering and try to soothe it. Not completely, because the blade that doesn't slaughter Babe rests on someone else, but at least a little. Not because that suffering can be uprooted, but because even sparing just a single drop makes a sweeter sun rise.