How to reorganize a Marxist superorganism from the inside. 9/10. Spoilers.

Rating: 10/10 (1 May 2003)

Animation has become the last vestige of grand storytelling for filmmakers. In its rush to satisfy the growing legions of ADD-sufferers (dismissive audiences with short attention spans), live action may have lost the battle to take its time. Nothing is `real' to us anymore, especially not the `reality shows' that cheat and corrupt their way through the use-and-abuse of idiots hoping for their 15mins of fame. Frankly, this is what postmodernism really gets us.
Substance (mental infrastructure) is being missed. Even adults need substantive messages, but their suspicions over who's doing the telling have allowed them to reject everything, throwing the proverbial baby out with the bathwater. That's postmodernism, the rejection of past perceptions. However, postmodernism has to insist that there IS no baby, and I have to argue that's going too far (it's one tiny step away from nihilism). So now I have a saying: Inclusivity is the baby--postmodernism is the bathwater.
The full deconstruction of everything society achieved in the past to start again from scratch, nihilism, is what General Mandible(Gene Hackman), the dictator of Antz(1998) wants to pursue, despite his ant-society's otherwise well-oiled albeit hierarchical (repressive) machine. Equating an ant colony with caste-system human societies now seems obvious; although ants have long been used as metaphors for human foibles/societal ills ever since the Greek slave Aesop won his freedom by entertaining nobles with his fables in the 6thC BC (A Bug's Life(1998) was developed from Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper).
Obviously, the strength of this `kids' film' lies in the story. As the directors say, their movie is about an ant world, it's not a dime-a-dozen story about some hero.
There's so much petty injustice in Antz society that, not surprisingly, they turn to a Marxist model (a hierarchy easily accommodating their pre-existing caste system). The worker-ants' cry of `It's the workers who control the means of production' now sounds like a Pythonesque pi**take of Karl Marx. The mantra is correct, but it's just so anachronistic!
Antz's canny political plot is related through a neurotic uber-individualist ant, Z(Woody Allen). Z and the plot so thoroughly cover the bases of an individualist manifesto that much of Woody's real-life career wind has been taken out of his sails. Antz(1998) single-handedly expresses most of Woody's lifelong concerns by giving him the platform to be his own purist. This may account for his subsequent career-lows Smalltime Crooks(2000) and Hollywood Ending(2002). In fact, Antz(1998) is a partial remake of Woody's Play It Again Sam(1972), and of It Happened One Night(1934) for the roadtrip segment.
Antz's `original' charm is undeniable. It's full of ironic/cutesy normalizations of rather terrifying ant-behaviour into our human sphere--eg the ants' regimented dancing, aphid-butt beers, flying insects representing higher social class, and insects that talk back after decapitation.
The funniest scene comes during Weaver(Sylvester Stallone)'s nervous midnight argument with Z: `Do you know how much trouble you can get into just for listening to someone trying to impersonate a soldier?!' -causing rubbernecking ants in the surrounding sleeping quarters to slam their heads back down.
I also loved Guantanamera, deconstructed as both uber-elevator-music, as well as a theme for Z's romantic interludes.
Mandible wouldn't be much of a threat if he didn't covet wars, so Antz doesn't look half bad as a war movie/ripoff of Starship Troopers(1997). The crucial depiction of Barbatus (a very tender Danny Glover) dying on the battlefield powerfully reminds us of the brutality of war. Barbatus became the most-liked character with child-age audiences (and me!).
Of course it's the generals who plan the wars, but it's the troops (or `troop')--and civilians in the middle--who get killed. Actually, harming civilians is necessarily more despicable, not only because soldiers have better protection, but because `collateral damage' makes logical justification for war that much more elusive. That's always been the case.
At best, war is conducted with smart bombs programmed by dumb intelligence. At worst, war is pointless man-made disaster, the outcomes of which then start off a new cycle of tit-for-tat on top of old, unsettled tit-for-tat. Warfare, except as a last resort, was opposed by no lesser a satirist than Francois Rabelais back in 1534 (Gargantua's speech). We don't need warfare, or their apologists, 500yrs later!
In Antz, Gen.`Man-Deeb-lay' sends his troops--those who are loyal to his queen instead of him--on a suicide mission. It's on this issue that I fault Darnell & Johnson, for never explaining what drove the General--he just seems to crave a colony without `incompetent' workers. Worse, we have no backstory for Col.Cutter(Christopher Walken)'s `fearsome' reputation (he'd been redesigned from just an assassin sidekick to Mandible). All this leaves a lotta plot holes.
However, my favourite scene shows Gen.Mandible in a simply stunning piece of spindoctoring. Although we don't know what drives him (other than putated madness), we see he's an old hand at Orwellian doublespeak worthy of any Hitler/Stalin. It's frightening how speedily he turns a hostile crowd by augmenting and reinterpreting holes in their knowledge; highlighting how easy it is to brainwash people who aren't able to cross-check the information they're fed by their unimpeachable authorities.
Eric Darnell & Tim Johnson's technique of changing the story as new ideas arose from animators' improved techniques is probably responsible for this ant-world-movie being generally preferred to Disney's schmaltzier effort the same year (A Bug's Life). Although the 3yr-long revisions exhausted writers Todd Alcott + Chris & Paul Weitz, they allowed the story to incorporate homage touches to other movies, a practice well-established by PDI's Shrek(2001).
PDI's Antz(1998) also resurrects Stallone's comedy reputation after my beloved Oscar(1991). Stallone's ant soldier Weaver is a perfectly well-adjusted tough-as-nails softie. Weaver was given exactly the right amount of screentime for us to grow very fond of him, unlike J-Lo, who plays Azteca merely prototypically.
SPOILER:-------------------------------------------------------------- The proverbial happy ending rankles a bit for those of us who expected more philosophical debate; but the final message that all dictators must be resisted is good enough for anybody.(9/10)