Babe: Pig in the City (1998)

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General		Extras
Category	Comedy	DVD-ROM Extras Production Notes Biographies-Cast & Crew Theatrical Trailer Menu Animation
Rating
Year Of Production	1998
Running Time	91:51
RSDL / Flipper	No/No	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Programme
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	George Miller
Studio Distributor	Sony Pictures Home Entertain	Starring	Magda Szubanski James Cromwell Mickey Rooney
Case	Brackley-Trans-No Lip
RPI	$36.95	Music	Nigel Westlake

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 5.1 (384Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.78:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English Portuguese Greek French Arabic	Smoking	No
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Babe, ever enthusiastic on the Hoggett's farm, causes a nasty accident to befall Farmer Hoggett (James Cromwell), leaving him bed bound and restricted to a bit part in this movie. The farm is in imminent danger of being foreclosed, so Esme Hoggett (Magda Szubanski, stockier and with a Scottish accent instead of a faux American accent) takes Babe to the Big City to try and raise some funds to save the farm.

    What follows are some very unusual adventures when Babe and Mrs Hoggett become separated.

    This movie does not have the simple charm of the first one. Whilst still being enjoyable, I found that I was more readily critical of the more obvious special effects in this movie compared with the first. In this movie, it was often easy to tell what was special effect, what was puppetry and what was animal live action. In the original, this was very hard to do.

Video

    This is an excellent transfer which falls just shy of reference quality.

    The transfer is presented at an aspect ratio of 1.78:1. It is 16x9 enhanced.

    The transfer was razor sharp and crystal clear throughout. Shadow detail was excellent and there was no low level noise.

    The colours, once again, were rich and vibrant.

    There were no MPEG artefacts seen. Film-to-video artefacts consisted of minor amounts of aliasing - more than in the first Babe - which was slightly distracting at times. The worst scene for this was the view of the big city at night through the attic window which shimmered quite considerably. Film artefacts were very rare.

    Subtitles must be selected from the main menu, and the choices are dependent on which Region the DVD player is set to.

Audio

    Dialogue was always clear and easy to understand. There was a very slight amount of distortion in the dialogue in the left channel between 28:59 and 29:03.

    There were no audio sync problems with this disc.

    The score by Nigel Westlake is frequently present, and has a very similar feel to the original movie - whimsically classical in nature. Once again, it suits the overall mood of the movie excellently.

    The surround channels were utilized effectively by this soundtrack, with music and ambience placed in the rear channels. Whilst not being spectacular in its use of the surrounds, nonetheless the soundtrack enveloped you subtly in the movie, even more so than the original Babe.

    The .1 channel received a small amount of signal which was well-integrated into the overall soundtrack.

Menu

Production Notes

Cast & Crew Biographies

Theatrical Trailer

DVD-ROM Features

    The Region 4 version of this DVD misses out on;

• Full Frame version

    There is nothing compelling to prefer one version over the other.

    The video quality is excellent.

    The audio quality is very good.

    The extras are fairly limited but are very well-presented.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall