Not necessarily the best movies ever made, but these are twenty of my favorites, in no particular order.  Each post for the next twenty days will feature a brief discussion of one film (though one or two days will have multiple posts to make up for absences).

Post 16: Babe (1995 dir. Chris Noonan)

“The pig and the farmer regarded each other and, for a fleeting moment, something passed between them, a faint sense of some common destiny.”

That line of dialogue, spoken early in the film by the Narrator (Roscoe Lee Browne), got my attention. It sets the tone and builds expectations for something grander and more meaningful than I was anticipating. Not long after, Ferdinand (Danny Mann), the anorexic duck, shows up panicking about the upcoming Christmas holiday and his potential place at the dinner table. “Christmas means carnage!” he cries. Later, when he does not become Christmas dinner, he gets philosophical, “The fear’s too much for a duck. It – it eats away at the soul! There must be kinder dispositions in far-off gentler lands.”

Kinder dispositions in far-off gentler lands…the movie really had me at this point. Oh, and there’s the greek chorus of mice who introduce each chapter and interject commentary throughout the film, even bursting into their own squeaky version of “Blue Moon.” The creative genius evident here never stops, never talks down to the audience, and never disappoints.

Babe is a tour-de-force of empathy and innocence exploring the nature of the world and one’s place in it. None of this would have worked without the few human actors in the film, particularly James Cromwell, in an Oscar-nominated role, as Farmer Hoggett. A man of few words but with a decisive moral center, Hoggett is one of the most courageous of characters in any movie ever. His belief in Babe tests his own sense of social place. And his eventual choice to stand outside the circle of his peers demonstrates remarkable bravery, an imitable act of faith which I have rarely seen in movies.

That and his serenade/dance jig is simply adorable. I just want to hug this movie.