- Accidental Innuendo: Mrs. Hoggett polishes a first prize trophy for the Kingsmith Dick Show, which is a Shout-Out to the author of the original novel, but sounds like something much less innocent.
- Adaptation Displacement: The movie is far more widely known than the original book, The Sheep-Pig by Dick King-Smith. This is less so in Britain, though, where Dick King-Smith is a well-known children's author.
- Awesome Music: "If I Had Words", which ranges from sweet, heartwarming, and even a bit of a Tear Jerker, to plain awesome when the orchestra cuts in. As well it should be, considering its tune comes from Symphony No. 3 in C minor by Camille Saint-Saëns! Also the end credits version: those mice really can show off their pipes!
- Base-Breaking Character: The mice, being either adorable or just annoying.
- Fridge Horror: Babe's mother was killed, and more than likely his siblings too.Babe: So my mother and my father and my brothers and my sisters all...
- Fridge Logic: Rex is nearly deaf, yet he and Fly have at least one very quiet conversation together. One might justify this as him being a dog and so he's only "almost deaf" compared to other dogs, but Fly specifies that he couldn't hear his master's commands while herding — commands which almost certainly would have been shouted or at least called out loudly. note
- Maybe Rex knows how to lip-read?
- The competition would've had a lot of background noise, specifically background noise of other voices. Rex might have technically been able to hear Hoggett's voice, but not been able to pick it out from the other sounds, especially since he would have still been getting used to his new level of hearing. There's not a lot of background noise when he's talking to Fly, and he's also had more time to get used to how his hearing works now.
- Jerkass Woobie: Rex. He has a terribly tragic backstory and proves himself to be Jerk with a Heart of Gold, once he overcomes his own bitterness and realizes just how good Babe is for his master.
- Narm Charm: It's a movie about a talking pig that becomes a sheepdog. But holy hell, is it cute and heartwarming.
- Nightmare Fuel: The scene at night where we hear Arthur Hoggett approach Babe...only to walk past him and enter the shed where he kills a duck for Christmas dinner instead. The way the music builds up, you assume that Babe's time is up, but instead you hear a duck's frantic quacking followed by the sound of the meat cleaver chopping. Then you think that it's Ferdinand who was on the chopping block, only for it to be revealed the next morning that it was actually a duck Ferdinand loved named Rosanna.
- The scene where we zoom in on Duchess' face after she was thrown out for hurting Babe. Even though she's a normal cat, you can still tell that she's sporting a Kubrick Stare, planning a way to throw Babe out, which is very unsettling and a bit intensely scary. The narrator's dialogue and the music serve to add to the unnerving nature of this scene.
Narrator: There are many perfectly nice cats in the world, but every barrel has its bad apples. And it is well to heed the old adage: beware the bad cat bearing a grudge.- Rex and Fly’s fight also counts. Fly was just trying to comfort him, but his jealousy towards Babe finally gets the better of him and he outright blames and attacks her.Rex: You put these ideas into his head! You two-faced, TRAITOROUS, WRETCH!
- And when Arthur tries to break up the fight, Rex bites his hand, shocking everybody, Rex included.
- One-Scene Wonder: A rather infamous example, involving the Spoiled Brat granddaughter who screams upon seeing her grandfather's homemade dollhouse and complains that it wasn't the one from TV.
- Retroactive Recognition:
- Before becoming known for playing Agent Smith and Lord Elrond years later, Hugo Weaving voice-acted Rex.
- The Hoggett's son-in-law is played by Paul Goddard who is better known to sci-fi fans as Stark from Farscape.
- Special Effects Failure:
- There are times where you can tell the sheep are either animatronics, or if they're in groups, just tied together with Velcro.
- More like Editing Failure: the shot of Babe right after he completes the routine is very obviously rewound and looped.
- Values Dissonance: Not in the movie, but the original book The Sheep-Pig repeatedly uses the word "bitch" in its literal meaning, a female dog, to describe Fly. Given how tainted that word has become by its offensive slang meaning, it's hard to imagine a more recent book using it so freely.
- Visual Effects of Awesome: After a while, you really forget that it's animatronics (and CG muzzle replacement) as opposed to real animals speaking.
- The Woobie:
- Hoggett during the Christmas scene when his spoiled granddaughter rejects the dollhouse he spent months building because "I want the house I saw on the television!" And when he's at the sheepdog trials with Babe in tow. You can see the effort it takes for him to just put one foot in front of the other when an entire town is laughing at him. Even his wife had lost faith in him at that point.
- Fly when her pups are being given away. She'd earlier stated that this was something she was prepared for, but you can see how much it hurts her to let them go.
