Welcome to the world of the ants

Rating: 7/10 (2 October 2011)

A lot of my friends saw this movie before me and they all said that it was a great movie so I decided that I wanted to see it as well. I finally managed to get around to seeing it after a couple of months with my brother, and my brother loved the movie; I thought that it was pretty good as well. It seems to be a computer animated and the animation is quite good. Antz is based in an ant nest and focuses on a worker ant named Zee (Woody Allen). Zee is a bit upset with his life because it seems to be meaningless, but all of this changes when the princess pays him a visit in the pub and dances with him. The princess isn't really all that interested, she just wants a bit of fun before she gets married to a creep who is the general (Gene Hackman). After this Zee is a changed ant and he wants to see the princess again, and the only way he can do this is by switching places with Weezer (Sylvester Stallone) who is a warrior ant. Unfortunately for Zee the ants are off to a war which they are not supposed to win, but Zee comes back alive and is made a hero only to fall foul of the General's plots. This is a very clever movie and has a go at a number of aspects of society including hyper-individualism and hyper-conformity. I guess the main message is that forced conformity does not work because it undermines the moral of those forced to conform, but neither does hyper-individualism because one person is never really capable of doing anything. Napolean did not conquer all of Europe by himself but with the support of the French nation. Neil Armstrong did not reach the moon by himself, but with the support of many other technicians. Though this film is very anti-conformity most of the way through, the realisation at the end is that we cannot save ourselves, we must ultimately rely upon somebody else. The other theme is that the weakest elements of society are not expendable. As Paul says in 1 Corinthians 12, each person with each gift plays a part to support the whole. Everybody has their role to play in society and we cannot simply eliminate them because we think them to be useless. In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy an entire civilisation was wiped out because of dirty telephones namely because they got rid of all of their telephone sanitisers, thinking them to be useless. Same goes in this movie, the worker ants may seem useless in war, but without them there would be no colony. Antz is a very clever movie and it also makes me think that Dreamworks is directly challenging Disney with movies. They released Deep Impact in rival to Touchstone's (Disney) Armegeddon, and same with Antz competing with A Bug's Life, and now they are also going down the Animation road with films like Prince of Egypt, and Disney attempts to compete with them by releasing animations as well. Antz is still a good movie and well worth seeing.