I thought a quick look at allmovie.com would answer the question why, in what I took to be an English movie, so many of the characters sound American most of the time. But the entry for the movie (here) has further confounded me. It turns out to be Australian, which I never would have guessed from the accents, though maybe I should have from the focus on sheep rearing.
Are there areas of Australia where people’s accents sound pretty close to standard American? We Americans tend to think of Australians as having very pronounced accents, though that may just be due to a limited sample of celebrities like Paul Hogan.
Well, James Cromwell (Farmer Hoggett) is American, Christine Cavanaugh (Babe) also appears to be American, Miriam Margoyles (Fly) is British, Roscoe Lee Brown (Narrator) is from New Jersey.
So, of the main characters, only Magda Szubanksi (Mrs. Hoggett) was born in Australia, although Hugo Weaving (Rex) lived much of his life there (he was born in Nigeria, actually, then raised in South Africa as a child).
Although the film was made in Australia, not every actor was Australian, which I guess accounts for the accent.
To answer your question, many people who have spent time outside their native countries can have a much lighter accent.
The book upon which the film was based was written by Dick King-Smith and was set in his native Gloucestershire, England.
Although not all Australians sound like Paul Hogan, there is nowhere in Australia where the locals sound remotely American, unless you count slang picked up by kids from the TV.
I recall an interview with James Cromwell where he said that during postproduction they re-recorded the dialog numerous times, tweaking the accents toward different locales until they found a combination that they liked for the movie.
So I think they were intentionally trying to create the effect you experienced: making the accents a little quaint and pastoral, but not identifying them with a specific country.
Heh. And to think, it was directed by the same man who did Mad Max… where they (the powers that be, that is) redubbed Mel Gibson’s voice because he sounded TOO Australian.
and here I was thinking how pronounced American accents are! Cos we Aussies don’t have an accent, y’all!
grin
Yes, I’m being silly, everyone has an accent, it’s simply the variations in locality and community that affect how pronounced that accent appears to others. I’m often queried about my origins because I ‘don’t have a strong accent’. Excuse me, but I DO have a strong accent …depending on where I am!.
As for the accents in Babe, our Magda doesn’t sound like that at all. Joools got it in one, they were going for a provincial, rustic feel.
Even the visual look of the film has been tweaked. Babe’s farm is not far from the farm where my dad grew up, but when my dad saw the film he had no idea WHERE it was shot. It certainly doesn’t look like ‘Australia’ per se, although there are certainly areas that look like that in south-west of the big smoke.
(the movie was shot near Mittagong and Bowral about an hour south of Sydney, if I recall correctly).
I recall hearing James Cromwell say he originally played Farmer Hoggett as an Irishman with a pronounced brogue (rather like the one he used in “L.A. Confidential”).
Initially, nobody thought “Babe” had huge commercial potential in the U.S.A., so nobody worried how the accents would sound to American audiences. It was only after shooting had completed that the filmmakers came to believe their little movie could be a smash in America and throughout the English-speaking world. So, they redubbed the film so that the accents wouldn’t seem “foreign” to American ears.
Of course, the characters still used words and phrases (“telly,” for example) that no American would ever use!
I would say that in the past few years what James Cromwell has been doing is playing a lot of authority figure types. Given that he’s 63 years old, that’s not unexpected. I think he’s an underrated actor. He’s been doing good work for a long time now. Check out his page on the IMDb:
He was Stretch Cunningham on All in the Family and Mr. Skolnick in Revenge of the Nerds. I thought his was the best performance in L. A. Confidential. Not Russell Crowe, not Kevin Spacey, not Guy Pearce, not Kim Basinger, not Danny DeVito, but him.