Following his usage in a "guess the weight" contest at an agricultural show, orphaned piglet Babe is brought home to the farm of the contest winner, Arthur Hoggett. There, he is taken in by Border Collie Fly, her irascible husband Rex and their puppies and befriends a duck named Ferdinand, who wakes people by crowing like a rooster every morning so he will be considered useful and be spared from being eaten. Dismayed when the Hoggetts buy an alarm clock, Ferdinand persuades Babe to help him get rid of it. In doing so, they wake Duchess, the Hoggetts' cat, and wreck the house in the ensuing chaos. Rex sternly instructs Babe to stay away from Ferdinand and the house. Seeing Fly saddened when her puppies are put up for sale, Babe lets her adopt him. With the Hoggetts' relatives visiting for Christmas, Hoggett decides against choosing Babe for Christmas dinner and tells his wife Esme that Babe may bring a prize for ham at the next agricultural show. Ferdinand's love interest Rosanna is served instead, prompting Ferdinand to escape the farm. Babe investigates the fields, where he witnesses a pair of sheep rustlers stealing Hoggett's sheep and quickly alerts Fly and Hoggett, preventing the rustlers from taking them all. Impressed after seeing Babe sort hens, separating the brown from the white ones, Hoggett takes him to try and herd the sheep. Encouraged by the elderly Maa, Babe gets the sheep to cooperate by asking nicely, but Rex perceives Babe's actions as an insult to sheepdogs. When Fly stands up for Babe, Rex attacks and injures her and bites Hoggett's hand when he tries to intervene. Rex is subsequently chained to the dog house and sedated, leaving the sheep herding job to Babe. One morning, Babe scares off a trio of feral dogs attacking the sheep, but Maa is mortally injured and dies as a result. Hoggett, thinking Babe was responsible, attempts to shoot him dead, but Fly finds out the truth from the other sheep and distracts Hoggett long enough for Esme to inform him about the dogs' attacks on neighbouring farms. When Esme leaves on a trip, Hoggett signs Babe up for a local sheep herding competition. As it is raining the night before, Hoggett lets him and Fly into the house, where he is scratched by Duchess, who in turn is temporarily confined outside as punishment. When she is let back in later, she gets back at Babe by revealing that humans consume pigs. After learning from Fly that this is true, Babe runs away and Rex finds him the next morning in a cemetery. Hoggett brings a demoralised Babe home, where he refuses to eat. After Hoggett sings " If I Had Words " and dances a jig for him, Babe's faith in his affection is restored. At the competition, Babe meets the sheep that he will be herding, but they ignore his attempts to speak to them. As Hoggett is criticised by the bewildered judges and ridiculed by the public for not using a dog, Rex runs back to the farm to ask the sheep what to do. After he promises that he will treat them better from now on, the sheep disclose to him a secret password. He returns in time to convey the password to Babe and the sheep now follow his instructions flawlessly. Amid the crowd's acclamation, Babe is unanimously given a perfect score. When Babe sits down next to Hoggett, the latter praises him with the standard command to sheep dogs that their job is done, "That'll do, Pig. That'll do."

In 1967, Austin Powers is a flamboyant British spy, renowned for his charm, style, and embodiment of the era's free-spirited hedonism. Unable to defeat Austin, his nemesis Dr. Evil cryogenically freezes himself, intending to return when free love has waned, and greed and corruption dominate society once more. Austin volunteers to be frozen as well, so he can confront Dr. Evil when he returns. In 1997, Dr. Evil is revived and discovers that many of the evil schemes he planned, like damaging the ozone layer and fabricating a sexual scandal involving Prince Charles, have already occurred without his involvement. Meanwhile, his lieutenant Number Two has transformed Virtucon, the legitimate front of Dr. Evil's criminal empire, into a multibillion-dollar corporation. Uninterested in business, Dr. Evil threatens to hold the world ransom with nuclear weapons until he is paid $100 billion. He meets his teenage son, Scott, conceived with Dr. Evil's preserved sperm; Scott rejects Dr. Evil's attempts to form a relationship out of anger at his absence. The British Ministry of Defence revives Austin and assigns agent Vanessa Kensington —daughter of his former spy partner Mrs. Kensington —to help him adjust to the 1990s. Unlike her mother, who shared an unspoken love with Austin, the no-nonsense Vanessa is unimpressed by Austin's outdated attitude toward casual sex and relationships. However, she is won over by his charm and the two soon develop a romantic connection. Undercover as a married couple, Austin and Vanessa travel to Las Vegas and encounter Number Two and his secretary, Alotta Fagina. Austin infiltrates Alotta's penthouse and discovers Project Vulcan, Dr. Evil's plan to detonate a nuclear warhead in the Earth's core, which will trigger volcanic eruptions around the world. After learning that Austin had sex with Alotta, Vanessa is upset, and warns him that he will end up alone if he does not adapt to modern values. As Austin catches up on the historic events he has missed, he contemplates his isolation, his friends who have died or outgrown him, and society's disdain for his archaic behavior. Austin and Vanessa infiltrate Dr. Evil's lair at Virtucon headquarters, but are captured by his henchman, Random Task. Despite the United Nations agreeing to pay Dr. Evil, he continues with his plan. Austin and Vanessa escape, then Vanessa summons reinforcements. Austin encounters Dr. Evil's fembots—irresistibly beautiful female androids with machine guns concealed in their breasts—and destroys them by overloading their systems with a striptease. British forces storm the lair as Austin disables Project Vulcan. He confronts Dr. Evil, who mocks Austin's outdated ideals. Austin retorts that the core value of the 1960s was freedom—a principle that remains timeless. Activating the lair's self-destruct mechanism, Dr. Evil escapes in a rocket, and Austin and Vanessa evacuate before the lair explodes. Three months later, Austin and Vanessa are married. During their honeymoon, Random Task attacks, but they subdue him. In a cryogenic chamber aboard his rocket, Dr. Evil vows revenge.

Paul Giamatti is an actor who becomes so impassioned with the characters and roles that he plays that he has trouble disassociating himself from the character after the scene is done. As a result, his mind and spirit are a tangled mass of emotions that he seems to have trouble separating from his own feelings. As he struggles to play Uncle Vanya, he reads an article in The New Yorker regarding "Soul Storage," a procedural clinic that physically removes one's soul from his body. While hesitant at first to go through with such a procedure, being unsure how it would affect him, Paul decides to go ahead. On visiting the clinic he discovers that most souls come out as gray matter or clouds. He decides to go ahead, declining the offer to look at his soul as it happens. He is distressed to discover that his soul comes out looking just like a chickpea. He has it stored in the clinic and returns to his life with 5% of his soul remaining. He is told this is like residue, enough to leave him with some emotional reaction, like affection for his loved ones and hobbies but not very deep or complex feeling to new things. He at first feels more relaxed, however his life begins to fall apart; he has trouble associating with or making love to his wife Claire despite wanting to. Lacking in emotional intelligence in new situations, he is easily bored and says insensitive things, such as telling a friend to just "pull the plug" on her comatose mother, and his acting for the Chekhov play lacks believability. Not wanting his soul back just yet, he instead obtains the soul of what he is told is a Russian poet, whose memories entice him to be curious about her and her life as well as obtain a curiosity of his own. This Russian soul allows him to play Uncle Vanya excellently, but the experience overwhelms him and he decides to get his own soul back. Paul's world is turned upside down when Nina, a Russian soul mule who transports people's souls to and from Russia, steals Paul's soul for the wife of her boss at the Russian soul-storage operation, who aspires to be an actress. She receives Paul's soul, believing it to be the soul of Al Pacino. Her acting and happiness improve. Nina, the mule who carried Paul's soul and has become curious about him, eventually reveals the whereabouts of his soul, helping him to get it back. As the pair investigate the soul of Olga the poet, which he had 'rented' during this period, they learn that she committed suicide after not being able to get it back after selling it. Paul and Nina get his soul back, and after looking into it through the use of special goggles to reassociate himself to it, he returns to New York a happier man. Nina's soul is found, but Paul is told that it is unrecoverable due to the residues of souls that she has carried.

When two grade-school boys get into a fight in the park that results in one boy, Zachary Cowan, hitting the other, Ethan Longstreet, in the face with a stick, their parents meet in a Brooklyn apartment to discuss the matter. Zachary's parents, Alan (Christoph Waltz) and Nancy Cowan (Kate Winslet), visit the home of Michael (John C. Reilly) and Penelope Longstreet (Jodie Foster), Ethan's parents. Their meeting is initially intended to be short, but due to various circumstances, the conversation continues to draw out.In fact, Alan and Nancy begin to leave the apartment on two occasions, but are drawn back in to further discussion. At first, the couples are friendly to each other, but their respective comments start to hurt feelings, making everyone argue with one another. Apart from fighting amongst themselves, the couples blame each other about who is responsible for the fight between their sons. Nancy calls the Longstreets "superficially fair-minded" and Penelope and Michael complain about Alan's arrogant and dull attitude. Everyone also gets irritated with Alan when he accepts endless business phone calls on his BlackBerry, interrupting the discussion, and showing he has more interest in his business problems than the matter at hand. Michael also receives many phone calls from his ailing mother, to his frustration. Nancy accuses Michael of being a murderer because he, annoyed by the constant noise it made during the night, had earlier turned his daughter Courtney's pet hamster loose in the street. Penelope becomes emotional about the hamster and with everyone arguing with each other. Other issues include a risky drug Alan is working to defend and Michael's mother has been prescribed, and the question of idealism and responsibility that is part of Penelope's current work. Michael offers everyone a glass of fine Scotch. Penelope claims she doesn't "get drunk" and Nancy drinks way too many and finally stops Alan's phone calls by dropping his cellphone in Penelope's flower vase full of tulips and water. Penelope and Nancy both laugh uproariously while Michael and Alan try to blow-dry the BlackBerry. The conversation continues to decay into personal attacks and opinionated statements and, eventually, epithets are uttered. Penelope is ranting, calling Nancy's son a "snitch", and Nancy's true colors are revealed when she destroys the tulips and drunkenly and vulgarly states she is glad that her son beat up Penelope's and Michael's son. The couples realize the conversation is going nowhere. Alan's BlackBerry, lying on the coffee table, vibrates, and all four stare at it. The film cuts to the hamster, alive and well in the park, where Ethan and Zachary are reconciling on their own.