Smarter than A Bug's Life but not quite as fun.

Rating: 8/10 (1 May 2008)

I always love a good animated film or TV show that can entertain both children and adults, like Toy Story or Shrek or The Simpsons, and while Antz is definitely aimed at pleasing both its older and younger audience members, there is something about it that is not quite as fun as its animated counterpart. There were numerous movies that were released seemingly in pairs around the same time as Antz and A Bug's Life were released, with one of them being better or more successful than the other, and it's clear to me that A Bug's Life is the superior film in this case. Antz, however, is certainly brilliantly written (like a lot of Woody Allen's best work), but unfortunately the film is not as versatile as I imagine was hoped.
Part of the problem may just be that Woody Allen is so recognizable. From the second Z starts talking Allen's neurotic, spectacled face jumps off the screen at you as if he were really there, waving his arms frantically. But his character is given great lines and there is certainly a lot of charming characters. I am reminded of some other "animated" films in which the characters look and act like the actors doing their voices, like The Polar Express or the recent and highly disappointing A Scanner Darkly. Sylvester Stallone, Christopher Walken, and Danny Glover all star as their animated selves, and this is one of the movie's charms.
The story, however, and especially the message, is amazing in its importance and clever delivery. We are introduced to a colony of ants that all mindlessly go about their age-old jobs supporting the hive, when suddenly one of them breaches that line that separates humans from animals, he starts thinking for himself. He begins to lament that his own personal needs are overlooked completely as he does everything to support the colony. There is a charming scene where all of the ants are dancing at a cleverly designed insect bar, and while they all dance in an insect-like unison, Z decides he's had enough of the conformity and cuts loose on the dance floor. He immediately charms the beautiful (as beautiful as an insect can get, I guess) and engaged Princess Bala, who is immediately drawn to his sense of freedom and individuality.
There are a couple of militaristic ants, perfectly named General Mandible and Colonel Cutter and played by Gene Hackman and Christopher Walken, who are obsessed with the defense of the colony and want to divert all resources to the build up of the military. They even give the queen false reports of an impending invasion of the far superior termites in order to convince the queen that they must act before its too late.
Lately I have been learning a lot about Chinese history, and this is astonishing in the similarity to the way Mao Tse-tung deliberately inflated the possibility of an impending American invasion of China so that he could convince Stalin to give him the resources and expertise needed to build a nuclear bomb. Or the way he would commonly instigate action from Chiang Kai-shek's Kuomintang so that he could make a massacre look like self- defense. Thankfully, when it happens in Antz it is much less scary!
The movie is filled with stunning visual sequences, many of them brilliantly inspired by the real lives of ants, with others that are clearly wild, but fun, flights of fancy .The animation is incredible and the script is intelligent, although there is just a tiny bit of Allen's unique style of comedy that doesn't fit very smoothly into an animated film, particularly one aimed mostly at adults. In a lot of ways, however, it does work. When praised for laughing in the face of death, Z comments in true Woody Allen form, "Actually I stand behind Death and make belittling comments at its back."
There is a noted absence of cute showtoons and cloying romance in the movie, which even features a surprising amount of battle violence, a lot of which may very well put off some of the movie's youngest audience members. But it's also revealing about some of the unique physical characteristics of ants, like the one about how dismemberment may not quite kill them, but not the one about how it's almost literally impossible to drown ants. They can live for weeks underwater, but are given a human-like need for oxygen for the benefit of the plot.
The end of the movie is a fun romp into the world outside the colony, and our heroes are clearly unprepared. There are some clever and brilliant things that happen to Z and Princess Bala, like getting stuck in a piece of gum of the bottom of a shoe on their search for "Insectopia," a picnic.
But the most important thing about the movie is the message. It's not about being yourself, but about not being the same as everyone else. After Z's brief military experience, he potently remembers a life-changing piece of advice given to him there.
"Don't follow orders for the rest of your life."