The Cinematheque

“Sorry Mad Max fans, but it’s George Miller’s masterpiece.”

Pat Graham, Chicago Reader

Mad Max mastermind George Miller steered the Babe series into gloriously nutty, left-field territory with this ingenious sequel to the 1995 sleeper hit. Trading the barnyard for the big city—and oh, what a city!—Miller’s clever, curveball film finds our hooved hero and the farmer’s wife (Magda Szubanski) decidedly ​“not in Kansas anymore” after their flight to a faraway sheepherding contest is comically interrupted. (The fair’s hefty cash prize would be enough to save their farm from foreclosure.) Madcap mayhem ensues, courtesy of some sartorially-savvy chimpanzees, an orangutan butler, Mickey Rooney, and a motley crew of urban-wise four-leggers. The made-up city of Metropolis, a disorienting, dystopian nightmare, unfolds through a series of jaw-dropping set pieces that anticipates Miller’s 2015 return to the Road Warrior-verse. Gene Siskel famously named Pig in the City the best movie of 1998.