Product: Bebe, Un Coninito Va Muy Lejos (Babe -- Spanish edition) [VHS] (1995)
Rating: 5.0
I love this film even more than the first time I saw it
I've seen this film several times since I bought it several years ago. The only bad thing about it is that it's not in letterbox format, which I have always preferred to the pan-and-scan method. There are some TV shows these days that are in widescreen, so why is it that so many movies have never been released this way? I'm getting off the subject, though.I never really thought I'd like this movie. The first thing I thought of when I heard it was out in theaters was, "It's 'Charlotte's Web' in a different form". Well, in a way this was accurate, but in other ways it was dead wrong. Yes, the animals do talk, but this is defintely not "Charlotte's Web"! I suppose I still have an image of the animated version of that book. Babe proves himself to be a much more capable pig, even if he is a little young and in need of some help sometimes, but I would have to say that I found this film much more endearing. It's got heart and feeling to it, but it also isn't overly-sentimental or sappy. The animatronics are done very well. I've seen films that use puppets or animatronics (think of them as mechanical puppets, like what the Henson people use) before and after I saw this film, and I think this film still has some of the best work in it. It's very hard to tell which are the real animals and which are the mechanical.It's also hard to tell where this film takes place. It looks as if it could be in Scotland or the USA. The landscape has a very timeless feel to it, too--even though a fax machine is present in the film, I couldn't help but feel that most of the film took place in a time before telephones.This is one of those films that adults wouldn't mind taking their kids to. Heck, I don't even have any kids, but once I finally saw a copy of this movie at my friend's house (he's way older than me, and also has no kids), I no longer thought he was a lunatic for owning a copy of a kid's film. The opening credit sequences are some of my favorites, and I also enjoy the song the farmer sings to Babe (though one of the first things my friend did was buy a copy of the classical piece it was based on for me :).This film will be in my collection for a very long time.