Chris Noonan gives a talking pig the courtesy of a proper personality. We rate Babe highly for its humour and patience with its animals, though his small feature output makes broader claims about his cinema difficult to support.
Fi1m perspective
The piglet in Babe (1995) is polite, and Chris Noonan takes that politeness seriously. With fellow screenwriter George Miller, he builds a farmyard in which the animals have been taught what to expect from one another, and do not readily reconsider. We were moved by the pig’s courtesy, because Noonan makes it a practical way of getting past those assumptions rather than merely a reason to find him adorable. There is plenty to laugh at, too. This is family filmmaking we recommend warmly, with enough interest in the other animals to keep the piglet’s goodness from becoming tiresome.
Much of that success depends on allowing an animal time to respond. Editors Marcus D’Arcy and Jay Friedkin leave room between voices, so the conversations feel like encounters between creatures with separate ideas. The trained animals, animatronics and computer effects serve those exchanges without distracting us from how the creatures behave. Nigel Westlake’s music is less trusting, sometimes pressing an emotion the performances have already conveyed. The quieter passages give us more room to appreciate Noonan’s light touch.
Before Babe, his first theatrical feature, Noonan had worked in documentaries and television, including the mini-series Vietnam (1987), which he helped write and direct. His second theatrical feature, Miss Potter (2006), came eleven years later and turned to the life of Beatrix Potter. Its attention to period detail and social conventions suggests an interest beyond animal stories. We would be cautious about calling two features a settled style, but the concern with expected behaviour is worth following.
It would be easy to credit Noonan simply with keeping a complicated animal production under control. What matters more in Babe is how little of that work intrudes on the comedy: even creatures whose rules obstruct the pig have an upbringing that explains them. His patience with those characters is the quality we would most like to see carried into another feature. Start with Babe, and accept that the music occasionally insists on feelings the animals have already earned.
Biography
Chris Noonan is an Australian film and television director, screenwriter and producer. Born in Sydney in 1952, he studied in the inaugural directing course at the Australian Film Television and Radio School in 1973 alongside Gillian Armstrong and Phillip Noyce. He began his career with short films and documentaries, including the award-winning Stepping Out (1980), before directing television miniseries such as The Cowra Breakout (1984) and Vietnam (1987).
Noonan made his feature directorial debut with Babe (1995), which he also co-wrote with George Miller. The film received seven Academy Award nominations, including for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. He later directed the biographical film Miss Potter (2006). Noonan served as President of the Australian Screen Directors' Association from 1987 to 1988 and as Chairman of the Australian Film Commission from 1990 to 1993.
