Too Clever By Half

Rating: Null/10 (25 October 1998)

There's no doubt that the technical advances in the film making business are downright amazing. The insects in Antz (don't ya just lurve the spelling???) are completely computer generated by the Dream Works studio in association with Jeffrey Katzenberg and Steven Speilberg. The industry has come a long long way since those few tortuous bits of bytes in Jurassic Park not all that many years ago. But sometimes we humans can get just a little bit too clever, or perhaps not smart enough, and Antz, although commendable, has neither the fantasy element needed for a good children's film, nor the realism needed for a decent adults flick. Antz is pretty entertaining, and visually it is every bit as stunning as Toy Story, although Antz is more sophisticated and has a much darker look than the suburban Toy Story. As you can imagine, much of the action in Antz takes place underground. Antz tells of an ant called Z (voiced by Woody Allen) who doesn't want to just be one of the crowd. He has an illicit romance with a princess ant (Sharon Stone) and they break the mould and come into conflict with the status quo. There are heaps of references to politics, movie genres, sexual angst and therapy, as you'd expect from a story starring a Woody Allen type off character. But can an animated film effectively portray complicated emotions? Not so far it seems. The ants in Antz have faces that are almost human, but that then becomes disappointing, because so far the craft hasn't got any where near being able to really display the complexities of a human face.
We love faces. We spend our lives studying the extremely subtle messages a tiny tremor of an eyebrow or lip might portray; to such an extent that we often don't even consciously realise how subtle we are as observers. If film makers are going to step towards trying to depict real human faces on animated creatures, and not leave animated films where they have been so far; a film world where it is obvious that the creatures, the faces, and the personalities are only two dimensional and shallow, then they will continue to disappoint movie goers.