The Ant Bully

Plot synopsis:
In Las Vegas, lonely 10-year-old, Lucas Nickle (Zach Tyler Eisen) is left with his older sister, Tiffany (Allison Mack), and his grandmother (Lily Tomlin) when his parents go to Puerto Vallarta. Neglected by his family and tormented by a local bully, Lucas takes out his frustration on an anthill and attacks it with a squirt gun, terrifying the ants. One ant, an eccentric wizard named Zoc (Nicolas Cage), tries to fight back. His girlfriend, a nurse ant named Hova (Julia Roberts), attempts to communicate with Lucas. She is almost crushed before being rescued by Zoc. The leaders of the colony use a potion to shrink Lucas down to ant size.
The local exterminator, Stan Beals (Paul Giamatti), convinces Lucas to sign a contract to kill vermin. Later, Zoc and a small troop of ants pour the potion onto his ear. He wakes up and discovers that he is now tiny, where he lands on a potato chip. He is carried to the anthill into a world of giant caves, caterpillars and ants. Zoc insists that Lucas should be studied then eaten, but he is overruled by the Queen (Meryl Streep). She sentences Lucas to hard labor.
Hova volunteers to train Lucas, much to Zoc's mortification. They both learn about the differences between ants and humans. However, when she forces him to forage for jelly beans with Kreela (Regina King) and Fugax (Bruce Campbell) Lucas is unsuccessful. The ants are attacked by wasps. Lucas finds a discarded firecracker and uses it to scare away the wasps. This earns him the admiration of all the ants – except Zoc.
Lucas is introduced to honeydew, the feces of caterpillars. He is shown a painting which depicts the Great Ant Mother and the evil "Cloud-Breather", an exterminator. Lucas is told that the Great Ant Mother will return and shower the ants with honeydew, while the Cloud-breather will spell destruction for all of them. He and his friends return to the house, where he tries to cancel the contract but dials for pizza instead. To make matters worse, Lucas' sister comes in, she becomes a giantess and tries to crush the ants with the phone (not just Fugax) as they are forced into hiding until dark.
When Zoc finds out that Lucas put Hova in possible danger, he accuses Lucas of further treachery and tells him that he should find another wizard because there is no way that he will give Lucas the potion to turn him back again. Lucas runs away, frightened, and Hova becomes angry with Zoc. But when Lucas is swallowed by a frog, Zoc frees him. Afterwards Zoc and Lucas discuss their differences. Zoc explains that ants work for the benefit of the colony. Lucas states that most humans work for personal gain. Zoc is unsure as to how anything gets accomplished in Lucas' world.
They enlist the aid of the wasps; at first, the wasps want to eat Lucas, but hearing that their nest is destroyed by Beals, they agree to help. During the battle with Stan, Lucas saves the lives of Hova and an injured wasp. Both the ants and wasps were no match against pesticide, but as Stan is about to exterminate the ant hill, a beetle and glowworm manage to bite him in the testicles.
As Stan Beals doubles up in pain, Lucas injects him with the shrinking potion, horribly misshaping, disfiguring and shrinking him, and as a result he runs away using a tricycle. The queen then pronounces Lucas an ant in honor of his heroic actions. Zoc gives him the antidote. Lucas goes back to normal size and finally stands up to the bully who runs away. Lucas then showers the colony with jelly beans as a farewell gift.

Tags: psychedelic, cruelty, sadist

Review:
There was a lot of laughter and many people stayed to watch the colorful visuals at the end.If you don't like this movie, then perhaps you need to learn to kick back and relax a little more often.
I don't understand why some of the better animated films have semi-low ratings, I think because people were comparing this movie to the film "Antz", I'm not quite sure if it was a sequel, but I thought on it's own "The Ant Bully" was a very fun movie for all ages.
The animation and the story were fun and great to watch, I honestly think that The Ant Bully is one of the best animated films I have seen in a while.Lucas is a boy who is constantly picked on and he ends up taking his anger out on the ants in his front yard by smashing their colony and drowning them with the hose.
Not to mention that The Ant Bully in general is just a great animated film that the whole family could get a kick out of.
Wildly entertaining for kids and bits of off the wall humor for adults make The Ant Bully my top choice for cartoons and animated films this year!
My favorite all-star was Julia Roberts, who I believe is best playing in fun roles for children as she did in Hook as Tinkerbell.Nicolas Cage added a hint of familiarity and also added to the entertainment level for adults (i.e. imagining the "Lord of War" as a tiny ant!) Above that, my favorite part about the Ant Bully were the vivid scenes and camera angles between the world of the human and the world of the ant.
The animators had brilliant use of switching the perspective at different times  for example - *mini-spoiler* a fire cracker goes off and makes a gigantic BOOM in the underground for the ants, but the camera zooms out and it is a tiny pop for the world of humans.The variety of entertainment and different levels of humor make The Ant Bully this Summer's top choice for family fun!.
Ant Bully might be pretty interesting for anyone who hasn't already seen A Bug's Life and Antz, but you'll probably still yawn a little and say the magician ant's catch-phrase along with him when it's repeated for the third time..
For example, whenever I heard them say something like "Find your inner ant!" I wanted to cringe, and the scene where Nicolas Cage 'cursed the rock's children,' I thought it was really dumb, and there were other small little problems, but I quickly forgave the movie because it was fun and adventurous, and often exciting and thrilling.
With a story and style that's definitely aimed more at children than adults, "The Ant Bully" will probably be entertaining enough for the young ones, but might not have enough meat to hold the attention of an older viewer.
Nicknamed "Peanut the Destroyer" (Peanut being the name his mom calls him, and The Destroyer being what the ants called him) Lucas does learn from his new friends, especially Hova, he joins in the defence of the colony against an attack by wasps, and finally he becomes the inspiration for a plan to work together with the wasps to defeat an exterminator who's there to destroy both nests.The story teaches the value of co-operation in overcoming big odds, and it's a very overt (appropriately so) anti-bullying message.
That's right; four clever, genuine laugh-inducing moments.Everything else is a mere exercise in "how can we make little kids chuckle?" I'll give the movie credit - it will definitely play well with 5-year-olds, but that's because it feels like it was written by one.
Their stories are really only gonna be tolerated by their peers or those who love them most.Here's just one painful example of my experience with this film: "Curse upon your children," Nicholas Cage's character exclaims towards a couple of rocks."I don't think rocks have children," replies his Julia Roberts-voiced wife."They won't now," Cage yells as he throws them on the ground.The kids in the audience howl with laughter.
More like The Ain't Funny.Accuse me of taking this too seriously all you want, but as long as there are kid's movies that refuse to give adequate entertainment to the adults who are forced to sit through them for the sake of their children, there's going to be Johnny Betts standing up and harshly putting them in their place.THE GIST The Ant Bully is just another example in a long line of animated movies that don't know how to appeal to both children and adults.
But when Disney raised the white flag with their hand-drawn animation films two years ago, it signaled a new era in the animation industry, and perhaps not coincidentally, the demands demands for visually polished 3D animation has us witnessing other aspects, such as character development and storytelling, decline.I knew right from the start that Warner Bros.' "The Ant Bully" wasn't going to be exactly a picnic.
With the guidance of ants Hova (Roberts), Kreela (Regina King), and Fugax (Bruce Campbell), they teach the kid the values of - you know - teamwork, sacrifice, trust and friendship.It's not so much that "The Ant Bully" is a horrible movie, it's just that it's an uninteresting and tedious one.
A Bug's Life and Antz both came out around the same time frame a few years back, and are still fairly recent in most people's minds, yet just from the trailer, it looked like it was more of the same, and less of the different.
Upon being taken to the Queen Ant (Meryl Streep), Lucas is given the ultimatum of having to live and become like an ant, or else he will never go back to his original size.The movie basically goes on from here, and is generally fun for the most part.
Even to the point of not offering real tangible explanations for certain events that occur, that really do not make sense (and for a movie about ants shrinking a kid and making him one of their own, that is saying a lot).What really hurts the film is how much the audience has already seen in the trailer, and how much of what happens has already been done in other films.
It is not necessarily a bad thing, but it really does not make for anything distinguishing to come from it either.The voice acting is all fairly well done, from Cage in a more enthusiastic role than he usually gets, to Julia Roberts as the motherly figure (like we could not call that one in advance), to Paul Giamatti as the underused exterminator character.
I mean there is not much to see out of it because its just really BORING.But don't just listen to me because you might enjoy it,the ant bully learns a good lesson in the end and he makes some friends.There's not much action in it, the war lasts about three minutes.If i was you i'd watch cars instead because ITS GREAT.Thanks for listing.
A lot of the times the people who play the voices aren't enthused about it, this movie they definitely are.The plot is like Honey I Shrunk The Kids.
Powered by voices from recognizable stars, Antz had a more direct romance theme applied to it, whereas I felt The Ant Bully had a stronger social message to put across, given atrocities that are happening in our world right now.With The Ant Bully, I find that it is a surprising coincidence that this movie is released during a time when countries are whacking other countries, just because they can.
Ranging from barbaric acts like burning them with a lighter until they become crisp, or dropping them onto the rice cooker lid when the rice is cooking, having this sick glee in watching them run around escaping to no avail, or even splicing them into half with a blade.Lucas Nickle (voiced by Zach Tyler) is dubbed "the destroyer" by the ant colony (populated with familiar star voices like Julia Roberts, Nicholas Cage, Meryl Streep, Bruce Campbell and Paul Giamatti), given his atrocious acts on their habitat.
It's a pretty magical like colony that nature designed, with various ant work groups working with efficiency in keeping their colony alive, and they even have their own version of a Merlin, Zoc (Cage), who conjures up magical potions to teach Lucas a lesson.And it is precisely this lesson that is taught, with Lucas serving "community time", that gives strength to this animated film.
Like the racist bloggers who are sentenced not to jail, but to serve time in living with a community they fail to understand, so that they can learn and hopefully, be enlightened.It's also about the building of friendships from once enemies, and included here, though fleetingly, is both a subtle reminder and a commentary about the innate selfishness of human beings in general, in our pursuit for individual self gain, as compared to the natural cooperation amongst a colony of ants, for the good of the community.What makes The Ant Bully stand out, is its departure to a lot of elements which have become staple to recent animated flicks.
Definitely worth the watch, with handsome animation, good voice acting and a great moral, three reasons to look past the predictable story.
This is one to see with the family or if you want a light movie that can be enjoyed.The voice acting was great and the computer animation was good.
Lucas is a victim of bullying by the other kids in his neighbourhood; he takes out his frustration on those smaller and weaker than himselfthe ants in his gardenby flooding their colony with water.Fed up with Lucas's destructive behaviour, and keen to teach him a lesson or two, ant-wizard Zoc creates a magic potion which shrinks the boy to insect proportions.
With the now-tiny lad held prisoner in their nest, the ants set about showing Lucas the error of his ways.Inevitably, Lucas realises that he was wrong to persecute the poor little bugs, makes a few new friends, and eventually risks his life to save the colony from a nasty exterminator who is determined to destroy all insects.Thematically, the Ant Bully ain't exactly the most original of CGI movies: the 'bully' angle has already been tackled by both Antz and Toy Story; the whole 'talking insect' thing has been covered by Antz (again) and A Bug's Life; the 'shrunken-boy-in-the-yard' routine was done (poorly) in Arthur and the Invisibles; and the core message of 'tolerance for all others, despite their differences'well, that's as old as the (ant)hills!However, none of this matters too much because, with so much beautiful animation, several stunning action sequences (highlights being an air assault by nasty flies, and a brilliant frog attack), hilarious one-liners (yellow rain!!!) and sheer inventiveness crammed into 88 minutes, it's easy to be a little forgiving.Even the fact that writer/director John A.
Lucas Nickle (Zach Tyler) is a little runt who's always picked on by the neighborhood bully, so he takes out his aggressions (and neglect by his family) by being a major jerko to the ants and other bugs that reside in his family's front yard, even going so far as to flood the ant colony with the garden hose.
Of course, the other ants in the colony are more inclined to believe the latter than the former, but the queen and the head of council (Meryl Streep and Ricardo Montalban, respectively) have spoken.To add to the drama, Lucas - feeling shunted aside by everyone in his family - somehow signed a contract with a nefarious, take-no-prisoners exterminator (Paul Giamatti) while his parents are away.
When I saw the beginning credits of the film, it really felt like it's going to be really good, which was right.Before watching the movie, I didn't know why Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, and Paul Giamatti would waste their talents with this movie.
My Take: Imaginative animation, cute characters and superb voice cast save the film from familiarity.Before watching this movie, I already have hunches that it would suck.
The ants are wonderfully voiced by Nicolas Cage, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Bruce Campbell, Regina King and Ricardo Montalban, adding human character in to the creatures we sometimes love in the movies, but hate in real life.
As soon as i was done watching it i started to write this comment.The story is imaginary as it should be in this type of film, the animations are wonderful and characters are just perfect.I love the sub content which is very instructive for children specially this days where selfishness is the most usual quality for us human beings.I recommend this movie to every parent as well.
Lucas (Zach Tyler), a ten year old boy, takes out his anger on a colony of ants after becoming the target of the neighborhood bully.
While "Antz" highlighted their communist restricted society and "A Bugs Life" created highly memorable characters, "The Ant Bully" comes up short on pretty much everything and also has a very child-like view on the ant colony that doesn't end up doing the film any favors.
In general the ants are amusing but specific mention should be made of Fugax the scout - who is particularly funny and some other animals which Lucas and Zoc meet inside a frog's stomach.However, although worth a viewing, it is flawed throughout and can annoy people.Firstly, as you can tell from the paragraph above one of the funniest characters in this film was so peripheral to the narrative that they were hardly recognised.Secondly, at the beginning of the film, the exterminator gets Lucas to sign a contract  I'm not sure how valid a contract with a 10-year-old would be and surely the frivolous old lady would have been a more valid option for the exterminator.Thirdly, I think the frivolous old lady was too peripheral  she just seemed like an 'add-on' as with much of this film.Fourthly, I think the fact that Lucas was being bullied was an attempt to justify his behaviour when it needed no justification.
Unremarkable...Time To Move On. Not as colorful and fully resolved as A Bug's Life (1998) or as edgy and sharp as Antz (1998), this insect animated movie is lively enough for family fun if a bit flat and in the end unremarkable.
Nick Cage was pretty good as the wizard ant, Bruce Campbell was funny too but the highlight was Paul Giamatti as Stan the exterminator.*Spoiler*There is a scene later in the film that might be disturbing to younger viewers, in the frog's stomach there's a floating bug head.
There's not much of a story here, and the characters are paper thin cutouts with the voices of bored celebs who wanted some extra milk money between films.A kid gets shrunk by some ants who he blasted with a garden hose.
This movie even manages to be a little scary- nothing too frightening for even the littlest of kids, I don't think, but they managed to add a little menace that makes the plot work-- there are all sorts of dangers when you're an ant, apparently, from wasps to the exterminator.The script is cute and funny, yet clever enough to keep every member of a family entertained, as jokes are aimed at every age level, and even the young adult folks I saw at the preview without little ones in tow were complimentary and seemed pleasantly surprised at how much they liked the movie.
The script also surprisingly clever and poignant, with a sweet yet fairly subtle message- you don't feel like the movie is talking down to you or beating you over the head with their intended point.The animation in this film is soooo well done- some of the scenes are incredibly beautiful and the landscapes they came up with could keep you entertained all by themselves.
Wizard ant Zoc (Nicolas Cage) has invented a magic potion that he is sure will shrink Lucas down to their size, and it works, and they drag him down to their colony.
This film was obviously very hyped with the list of big stars providing their voices, and while the animation is good, the story that goes with it is a little dry, but I suppose there is some fun to be had for the family.
THE ANT BULLY (2006) **1/2 (VOICES OF: Zach Tyler, Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Regina King, Bruce Campbell, Lily Tomlin, Cherie Oteri, Larry Miller, Allison Mack, Ricardo Montalban) (Dir: John A.
Zoc(voiced by Nicolas Cage),the "wizard ant", creates a concoction that shrinks Lucas to the size of...well, an insect.
This movie is nothing new, but the animation is lively and vivid, the voice cast is energetic and fun to listen to, and the plot is a little more intriguing than I originally gave it credit for.Lucas Nickle (voiced by Tyler) is a small boy that has become the primary target for a local bully.
As Hova helps Lucas, Lucas learns that the little ants he thought never had feelingsare very much the friends he always wanted.The voice-over cast for this movie is, not surprisingly, amazing.
Overall, "The Ant Bully" really doesn't bring anything new to the table, but it doesn't feel like a shameless rip-off of several other films, despite a very familiar message (you can find a friend in the most unusual places).
They take him to their colony and there as punishment he must train to be an ant, so he can see how hard their life is.The voice actors are some of the most well-known, including Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep (Queen Ant), Paul Giamatti as the exterminator Stan, Regina King, Bruce Campbell, Lily Tomlin, Cheri Oteri, Larry Miller, Allison Mack, and Ricardo Montalban as the Head of Council.The animation is first rate and the script is good.
The Ant Bully is definitely not better than A Bug's Life, but still it's a really great animation.