Antz May Give You Sympathy for the Little Guys

Now I’m going to leave a lot more crumbs on the ground.

A neurotic worker ant (Woody Allen) in love with a rebellious princess (Sharon Stone) rises to unlikely stardom when he switches places with a soldier (Sylvester Stallone). Signing up to march in a parade, he ends up under the command of a bloodthirsty general (Gene Hackman), enlisted to fight against a termite army.

Antz is an animated film that I watched almost every day when I was a kid. So thank the lord for VHS bringing back the memories.

The one thing about Antz that was so ground-breaking back in the day was the visuals and just how beautiful the CGI looked back then. To be honest, it doesn’t hold up as well (it looks almost like a video game sometimes), but the fine detail to just the little specks of grass in the ground really made it a sight to gander at. I mean, there’s many better-looking films in today’s world, but back the day, Antz was the first.

The screenplay is pretty funny, with a clever blend of Woody Allen-type humor and your typical Hollywood fare that won’t have you laughing terribly but chuckling here and there.  I don’t just mean for the kids, but the parents as well. You’ll spot some references to films like Pulp Fiction, Rambo, and even some of Allen’s films, which kept me laughing and reminded me a bit of Rango in a way where it starts off as a satire and then becomes its own story, but still has plenty of time for some homages and references. Now I see where Gore Verbinski got that idea!

However, the problem with Antz is that some of this is funny, but the theme is about rebellion, freedom, war, death, and peace. Antz makes a lot of this pretty graphic with a totally disturbing war sequence that reminded me of Starship Troopers and how everybody practically gets killed right before your own eyes. Speaking of killing, there is this death where a bee gets swatted and dies. How it was shown was very disturbing, and to me this seemed almost a bit too harsh and kind of sad to be put in such a kid-friendly film.

I also was reminded too much of a very similar bug film that in a way, was actually kind of better:  A Bug’s Life. I don’t know why, but a lot of Antz seems like a harsher, darker take on that whole film and subject, and there were moments where Antz just looked like the same design from A Bug’s Life. Although both films aren’t really known as total classics, I still noticed a lot of similarities, and a couple of times, I actually felt like I was watching A Bug’s Life.

The casting of Woody Allen as Z was perfect, because he has all these great one-liners in his neurotic, standard role that he has played in all of his films, and he is what sets Antz apart from any other CGI animated film. You can tell there’s a lot of ad-libbing, and even though you never really see Woody Allen as the character Z, you see Z more as just an ant. He keeps the laughs coming, and, as predictable and generic as this story may be, Allen adds a slight twist to it.

There are a bunch of other well-known actors in this cast who were all kind of distracting, since these ants were all made to look like the stars who were voicing them, but it was still fun to hear them. Gene Hackman plays his usual, villainous role as General Mandible; Sylvester Stallone is quite funny as the tough-guy, Weaver; Christopher Walken is awesome as the voice of reason, Cutter; and Sharon Stone is pretty good as Z’s romantic interest, Princess Bala.

Consensus: Antz has some witty writing, beautiful visuals, and a likable, if already well-known cast, but the themes of rebellion and mass genocide may seem a little disturbing, especially when there are a couple of death scenes here that even I was a bit scarred by.

7.5/10=Matinee!!