babe and toy story

BABE and TOY STORY

reviewed by Mike Crowl

In two recent movies made for family audiences, the special techniques employed are such that they could easily overwhelm the stories. In fact, this happens in neither case.

Babe presents us with a farmyard full of real live animals who one minute behave as we'd expect, and the next talk and sing like human beings - as though this was perfectly normal behaviour. The techniques employed to achieve this are so seamless that we're never sure when the animals are real and when they're not.

Toy Story is the first film to be created entirely with computer graphics. An animated film, in other words, that has dispensed with the long-established technique of drawing each frame by hand in favour of using computers to do the task. (A few scenes in The Lion King were also computer drawn.) But instead of being dazzled by a computer display, we're charmed by a story that would be effective in whatever medium it was produced.

These films are truly family movies, the sort of thing we see so rarely these days, films to which you can take everyone from your toddler to your ageing grandmother, and know no one will be offended. Both have excellent stories, in which we find strongly presented characters with whom we can identify - well, up to a point. Perhaps I should say the traits of the animals and toys are readily identifiable.

On top of this, the stories have a great deal of originality and charm. Babe is a pig, but no ordinary pig. Because of her humble spirit she's able to take over the task of sheepdogging: she treats the sheep as creatures of intelligence and they respond in kind. The farmer who has won her in a contest realises her potential and enters her in the local sheepdog trials, to prove her worth - and confirm his instincts.

There's also a duck who'd like to take over the rooster's role (with minimal success), and a parochial cat who thinks she knows who's Boss. The story is set in a kind of half-way real world, where faxes and televisions exist, (along with obnoxious children straight out of Willy Wonka. But the farm itself seems to inhabit an almost fairytale-like landscape, (filmed in Australia, but looking nothing like it), where the most ordinary things seem strange. The farmer is also a bit strange - at one point he picks up a tune off the soundtrack (a theme from the Saint-Saens organ symphony) in order to sing his pig back to life.

Toy Story is also set in the "real" world, except that we're privy to the secret lives of the toys who inhabit Andy's bedroom. The latest addition to the "family", Buzz Lightyear, is convinced he's real, and takes no notice of Woody, a cowboy (and also the previously favoured toy), who tries to tell him otherwise. As a result of their arguments, the two find themselves outside, subject to the horrors of being lost, and also to the machinations of the nasty little boy next door - who likes blowing toys up. Meanwhile, Andy and his mother are moving house, and the question is: will Buzz and Woody get home while it still is home?

The grotesque toys in the house next door, as remodelled by their unpleasant owner, may upset small children on first sight. Though they prove in time to be as pleasant as the toys in Andy's house, they're cousins to the humorous horrors of the Addams Family movies, and their first scene is more than a little creepy.

All in all Toy Story is tremendously exciting and exhilerating, full of subtle jokes and humour that adults will appreciate far more than the kids, and with a climax that has you on the edge of your seat.

It's wonderful in these two films to see superb talents and state of the art techniques being put to such genial and delightful use.

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