Search - Randy Newman, Peter Gabriel, The Chieftains :: Babe: Pig In The City - Music From And Inspired By The Motion Picture

While it's true that kids love the adorable talking pink pork-pie piggy called Babe, there are subtleties truly appreciated only by adult viewers. The film is enormously smart, greatly entertaining, and funny. The same holds true for the soundtrack, but to the ears of adult listeners, there is a menacing edge to the voice of the narrator, and the jet plane roars warning of the plight about to befall Babe and his "human," Esme Hoggart. Nigel Westlake's score cleverly reminds us of the eerie witch-on-her-bicycle trill and the flying-monkey refrain from The Wizard of Oz, and while little ones are tickled by the singing and commentating mice, it is adults who will correlate them with a Greek chorus. Westlake seems to effortlessly glide from cartoony wah-wah to pepped-up waltz to soaring string assault. The remainder of the soundtrack veers from a classical cat choir to standards from Edith Piaf and Dean Martin to the adult-alternative friendliness of the Chieftans, the Mavericks, and Peter Gabriel, who performs the film's theme, the lovely Randy Newman tune "That'll Do." --Paige La Grone