This Pig Just Might Fly

Other movies heavy on animal action are also relying on nature and nurture rather than animatronic wizardry. Director Stephen Herek, who will start shooting Disney's live-action remake of 101 Dalmatians in England this October, will require dozens of new dalmatian puppies to play ''the hero group of 15'' every two weeks: ''They train them at six weeks old. They're still cute and cuddly at eight weeks,'' he says. And after their two weeks of stardom end? ''It's not like their careers are over — then they become part of the hundred, which can be of varying shapes and sizes.'' And in a family film about the exploits of Canadian environmentalist Bill Lishman that's currently shooting for Columbia, Oscar winner Anna Paquin (The Piano) plays a child who develops close ties to a gaggle of geese. Before production began, director Carroll Ballard (The Black Stallion) had Paquin on hand for the hatching of her costars, the idea being that newborn geese imprint onto the first living thing around them and then tend to follow that creature around as if it were their mother.

Going the back-to-nature route in this age of technology puts a smile on Karl Miller's face, but it's also a constant battle. Miller — who has since moved on to a gig wrangling 700 hamsters on the set of Eddie Murphy's The Nutty Professor — remembers when he happened to walk by just as the final shot (a zoom-in close-up of Babe at Farmer Hoggett's side) was being set up with the animatronic Babe. He admits to a little pigheadedness on that count: ''The animatronic never did a whole scene during the whole shoot up until then, so I was pretty insistent that the last shot should be a real pig. It took several takes to get him to look up and cock his head just the way we wanted, but we got the shot. So don't let anyone tell you that that's not a real pig at the end.'' Indeed, in the final cut of Babe, live pigs are on screen 96 percent of the time.

''Animatronics are brilliant,'' says Babe director Noonan, ''but if you leave it on screen for too long, the audience starts to realize that it's not organic. The human eye has an unerring ability to pick out a fake.''

Additional reporting by Degen Pener