The stunts of Mad Max 2. From a making-of documentary on George Miller's Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (1981); featuring stunt coordinator Max Aspin and stunt man Guy Norris. (This short doc used to be available on the 1997 special edition VHS, but is currently unavailable on home media format.)
This does nothing to assure me that no animals were harmed in the filming of George Miller's Babe: Pig in the City. Maybe it's a good thing for the sake of his actors (human or animal) that Miller has taken them out of physical harm's way of late by opting for the CGI safety of the Happy Feet franchise (the second iteration of which is being released this weekend), but as far as I could glean from the first Happy Feet, it's not a good thing for the viewer.
At the peak of his imaginative abilities, frequently on display in Mad Max 2, Dr. Miller's camera choices exhibited an exhilarating lack of regard for being bound to the physical world or any of its encumbering rules: a particularly memorable and inspired moment of sneak-attack kineticism comes at the beginning of a mid-movie car chase when the camera, at first apparently mounted on a tripod outside the passenger-side window of a car as its driver dives in, revs the engine, and peels out to join the fray, reveals itself to be mounted to the now-active car instead of the immutably staid earth.
Miller's work up till and through Babe 2 continued to exhibit such imagination, but the move to full-on CGI in Happy Feet seemed to limit his creativity to pop-song réchauffé rather than granting him the boundless possibilities of a "camera" now literally freed from the physical world. Someone please get a camera back into this guy's hands...preferably 3D. Scrap Mel. Call up Feral Kid. Son of the Road Warrior. 2014. And maybe get a few extra standby stuntsmen this time.