Gordy vs. Babe

Gordy

Gordy starts out promising: the title logo has a cute pig tail curling at the base of the “Y,” but it immediately loses its way, spinning up one of its two main plots. The first is the oddly grim story of a pig’s existential despair. Gordy the piglet watches as his dad is loaded onto a truck and chases down the road after him while his dad implores him to take care of the rest of their family. Gordy sniffles his way back to the farm, where a rooster squawks at him that his mom and five siblings were also taken away to the place that no pigs come back from.

Then the movie abruptly moves onto its second plot: the bizarre story of a pig becoming a CEO. Gordy is adopted by a little girl who travels around singing corny country songs with her dad. In a truly weird scene, she’s getting ready for bed and hides Gordy under the covers when her dad comes in to tuck her in. The two sing a weird lullaby at each other, then the dad leans over for a kiss and the camera zooms in on his face while someone offscreen smashes Gordy into his cheek. Mistaking a wet pig snout for his daughter’s lips, the dad declares, “That was a sweet kiss!”

That’s enough of that weird family, let’s see what’s going on with Gordy’s pig family. Oh, they’re in a horrific slaughterhouse with swinging hooks, men sharpening knives, and pigs squealing in terror. This imagery is so over-the-top, they could splice it into the visions of hell in Event Horizon.

Meanwhile, a doughy little boy named Hanky introduces himself to the girl and her pig, says “I enjoyed our conversation,” and walks away. A little later Hanky decides to slowly flail off a diving board into a swimming pool and flounder around for a while until Gordy jumps in and scooches a pool float to him, saving his life. It turns out that Hanky’s grandfather owns a massive company and Gordy, America’s new favorite hero pig, becomes the mascot. A photographer with a Bronson Pinchot accent takes photos of him while gushing, “Look at those piggy eyes. I love those piggy eyes.” Newspapers spinning at the screen keep us up to date on Gordy’s ridiculous rise to the top.

Soon, Hanky’s grandfather, described as “one of the nation’s most loved industrialists,” dies and leaves the company not to his adult daughter, but to Hanky, the boy so stupid he had to be rescued by a pig. But since Hanky is a minor, Gordy will be the interim CEO. Everyone loves the CEO pig. He’s on the cover of Time magazine and the stocks soar.

But wasn’t there something Gordy needed to take care of? Oh right, his entire family being whipped and terrorized in the slaughterhouse, his siblings screaming at their mother to help them while one of the workers says “Looks like it’s the end of the line for these pigs.” Gordy is at a terrible country music show, being congratulated by Bill Clinton for getting his own stamp, when he remembers to ask for help rescuing them. In the last scene, we see a farm that the company has bought so that Gordy and his pig family can live out their lives in peace and we watch as they roll around in the mud with shell-shocked expressions and Gordy the hero CEO pig is happy it all worked out perfectly for him.

Babe

George Miller, who co-wrote Babe and wrote and directed Happy Feet, likes to slip existential horror into family films. In Happy Feet, a young penguin is trapped in a zoo, screaming for help. The narrator tells us, “After three days, he would lose his voice . . . after three months, he would all but lose his mind.” There’s a similar, surprisingly dark narrator moment in Babe. It opens with piglets nursing when their mom is suddenly prodded onto a truck headed to “pig paradise,” with “MEATS” painted on the side. A silver ball with baby bottles descends from the ceiling to feed the soon-to-be orphans. Later, when the farmer mistakenly believes Babe has killed a sheep, he gets ready to shoot him. Babe sees the shotgun, which he notes is a “shiny black tube,” and the narrator says, “The pig had a vague memory that shiny tubes produced food and guessed that some quite unexpected surprise would come out of the two small round mouths.” What the fuck, George?!

But unlike Gordy, which lurches from CEO pig antics to slaughterhouse horror, Babe balances its darkness with sweet and gentle storytelling, touching on loss and death without punishing the audience. When the sheep dogs have to watch their puppies get adopted, the camera lingers on their sad faces. But we also get to see how excited both the puppies and their new families are. It’s a tough but bittersweet moment, not a tragedy.

It’s just as unlikely that a pig would learn to be an award winning sheep dog as a pig becoming the CEO of a company, but Babe earns our suspension of disbelief because in this story animals talk to each other and learn and grow. Babe is even better at herding sheep than the dogs  are because he combines his innate kindness and intelligence with the lessons he learns from his two mother figures, an old sheep and a sweet Border Collie, to persuade the sheep to do what he asks them to rather than scaring them. Gordy, on the other hand, inherits a company because he plopped into a swimming pool and shoved a tiny pool float at a dumbass rich kid.

Somebody uploaded the full movie Gordy onto YouTube and nobody has bothered to take it down because nobody cares about Gordy except for the dozens of nostalgia-blind fans in the comments section. But at least one of them gets it right: “Lol, this movie sucks. Babe is a FUCKING ICON.”

There can be only one Babe.