Make more children's films like this - make them all like this
There are only two kinds of children's films today - (1) the loud, obnoxious ones designed to temporarily redirect the attention of your little bundle of chemical imbalances now that the schools have finally denied your ritalin refill, or (2) the cooly-calculated june/december oscar shots injected with the precise amount of Disney Eyes and inoffensive head-patting necessary to slap their cardboard characters against the side of a plastic lunchbox and jerry-rig a short-lived franchise. You all know which are which.
The inception of the Babe films was neither of these things. (It was George Miller on a plane watching another passenger reading The Sheep-Pig and laughing hysterically.) Miller would go on to write for Babe and direct its even better follow-up. Films like it are dead today. But they don't have to be.
I used to be a kid, but it is only as an adult that I appreciate professionals of the long-long ago took the plunge and trusted me with orphaned heroes, dead deer, cannibalistic gnomes, severed heads that can still speak, and freaky muppets. Such were the '80s, but it was only a short while later audiences would pan (even boycott) Babe: PitC. Why? Surely it must have featured something truly awful - perhaps a grisly murder, or ritualistic human sacrifice, spliced-in single frames from El topo, or Ron Perlman nude, mid-discus throw.
Well, it had jabs at red tape, a sense of irony, an exploration at how and why people take advantage of each other, and a sympathetic take on the effects of abandonment and neglect. No flying heads tickling Satan's balls, not much fantasy at all, really. Fundamentally, it just mirrored reality too well.
Oh.
Where has the intelligence and enthusiasm of Don Bluth, Jim Hensen, or indeed George Miller gone? Maybe if every film made for children were more like this one, kids wouldn't grow up thinking Eli Roth or Michael Bay are artists.
Fantastic film for all ages. Children will find it refreshing they aren't being fed pandering, sanitized slop. There's more than thrilling entertainment here - there are lessons about friendship, community, rivalry, sucking life's lemons at one end and pissing a satisfying stream of sugar-free lemonade out the other.
Hollywood, stop doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JLDzjSy5DxY
Go back to doing this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vE8mFDabqD0
This is for you, Artax.