Animation Defenestration: The one with Woody Allen as an ant

 

Title: Antz

What Year?: 1998

Classification: Runnerup

Rating: What The Hell??? (2/4)

 

In planning out this feature, something that quickly came home is that if I really got back into this, I would be dealing with a much wider field than I have with any other feature, and a lot of potential for pure random even by my standards. With this review, I have a case in point. I had planned a weekend review to hit the milestone of 180 reviews, and watched a movie I had thought about for a long time to fill the slot. Then I got something completely different as an incoming disc from my subscription queue, one I really hadn’t planned to do this soon if at all even though I had already referenced it before. In a further first, it happens to represent a “runnerup” to a movie I already classified as such, with a possibly even more convoluted backstory. And with that, I present our exhibit, Antz, a movie that hit theaters at the same time as A Bug’s Life.

Our story begins with a cutaway view of the world underneath a grassy park, which brings us to an anthropomorphic ant talking to his psychiatrist. As he complains about being dwarfed by the colony around him, the doctor succinctly comments, “You are insignificant!” As the story proceeds, we get to know our familiar-looking character, a worker named Z. His fortunes seem to change when an attractive female named Bala dances with him, but he then discovers that the new girl is a royal heir slumming it. To get another chance with the princess, he switches places with his soldier ant friend, only to be sent by the commander General Mandible, the lady’s actual fiancé, into a massacre at the hands of a rival termite colony.  When Z returns as the sole survivor, the general allows him to appear as a hero, but quickly decides to eliminate him as a threat to his own unfolding schemes. To survive, Z has to flee with Bala in tow, toward a rumored paradise called Insectopia. Together, they must navigate the strange hazards of the surface world and the giants who dominate it. Then their final trial will be the choice between their newfound freedom or returning to the colony- before General Mandible destroys it!

Antz was a CGI animated film by SKG Dreamworks, released in 1998 shortly before the Disney/ Pixar film A Bug’s Life. The film was believed to have been based on a proposed story “Army Ants”, originally presented to Disney prior to Dreamworks founder Jeffrey Katzenberg’s departure from the company.  The animation was created by Pacific Data Images, a company that had previously worked on Terminator 2, Star Trek 6 and Sleepwalkers (can’t win them all). The high-profile voice cast was led by Woody Allen as Z and Sharon Stone as Bala, with Gene Hackman (see… Superman 4?) as General Mandible. Sylvester Stallone (see Judge Dredd) and Danny Glover of Lethal Weapon were featured as the soldier ants Weaver and Baratas. Both Antz and A Bug’s Life both attracted controversy for their similarities to each other. Critics ultimately noted substantial differences in theme, tone and potential audience, with Gene Siskel favoring Antz as a superior film. An ACAP award was given to the score by Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell. The movie earned a box office of $171 million against a budget estimated at up to $105 million. It remains available on home video, including streaming.

For my experiences, this is a movie I remember seeing in the theater, and at absolutely no time since before a viewing for this review. What really stands out is that I had no trouble piecing together the story and many of the scenes in advance, with ease and clarity even by my world’s-worst-superpower standards. (Have I mentioned lately that I found Krull?) That right there can serve as an encapsulation of the movie’s strengths and weaknesses: It is by all means memorable, yet not the kind of movie you hold onto or seek out. I had further experienced that myself a few years back when I saw this movie for a ludicrous price at a library sale, but still passed on buying it. When I finally decided to come back to it, what interested me most was simply assessing whether this was really any different than A Bug’s Life, or simply a film with even less luck. After viewing it, the only answer I can see is what I was ready to say from memory alone: One film tried to be timeless, the other tried to be trendy, and that made all the difference.

Moving forward, the first thing to note is that Antz is in many ways superior in animation, and I already commented at length what a high mark A Bug’s Life set. However, this quickly becomes “part of the problem”, and I find myself distracted trying to account for why. The easy and obvious answer is the sheer “uncanny valley” factor, and that is certainly here. It shows especially in the modeled faces of the ants, which for all the hype sometimes fail even at matching the actor; Bala in particular looks almost androgynous. Yet, I cannot accept this as the whole answer, especially with Pixar’s contemporary work factored in. To me, the deeper answer is that the animation fails to keep the viewer interested and invested in the world it portrays; the unhelpful phrase “sense of wonder” definitely comes into play. On this vein, the most telling sequences are those where the ants come in contact with humans. It should be eerie and terrifying to see ourselves through the eyes of a far smaller creature, and we get glimpses of that, like a magnifying glass that decimates the bugs like the Independence Day death ray. But there simply isn’t enough here to sustain the kind of mood that would reward the effort. I find it all the more telling that I personally found it noteworthy that A Bug’s Life never portrays humans at all.

That still leaves the issues of the characters and story. To me, there’s answer enough in Hackman’s character, which I count as the single reason I rate the movie as low as I have. Here, the unavoidable impression I get is that the film is referencing sources it does not understand. As far as we can speak of an anti-war genre (traceable in animation to “Peace On Earth” at least), the best examples dictate that there doesn’t have to be a conventional “villain” at all.  We can see this with Hackman himself in Crimson Tide; whether you take him as sympathetic or a sadist, his lines are clearly drawn at disloyalty to the leaders of the state. Here, we have a character who could be in the right or at least have a fair point, especially if his plan was limited to overthrowing the colony’s monarch. All we get, however, is eugenics-style muttering that ignores the actual biology of the ants, while his actual scheme is sheer lunacy on the level of Dr. Strangelove. The worst part is that the straight-up crazy angle could certainly have worked, if it was offered and developed, but we never get anywhere near the self-evident insanity of General Ripper (who still isn’t quite as crazy as Megavolt!). What we really end up with is a character whose actions are dictated by the story’s point rather than the character or the narrative, which greatly weakens the moral itself. As I think over all the other issues I could point out, I find very few that do not come back to the exact same problem.

That leaves the “one scene”, and there never were any that stood above the one I remembered from the theater. As we go into the middle act, Z marches with the soldier ants to battle. As they march, the bugs sing an almost comically grim version of “The Ants Go Marching One By One” that stuck in my mind stronger than anything else in the film. What works just as well, if not quite as memorably, is the dialogue between Z and Baratas, voiced superbly by Glover. (That reminds me, I need to find an excuse to review Predator 2.) As Z nervously asks about the enemy termites’ capabilities, the seasoned warrior casually gives a description worthy of the Starship Troopers space bugs. When Z starts to question their mission, Baratas merely remarks  “I like you, you have a sense of humor!” It’s a funny yet introspective scene that feels like it belongs in a 1960s/ ‘70s “protest” film, so of course, there’s nothing in the film that follows it up.

In closing, I find myself coming back not to the rating but to the classification. This movie perfectly embodies what I always thought of as a “runnerup”, with A Bug’s Life as the obvious counterpart. What’s unique, of course, is that I actually reviewed the “mainstream” movie first, and also classified it as a runnerup. To me, it really wasn’t counterintuitive that two films could count as “runnerups” to each other. It just never previously happened that any two such movies had otherwise comparable “profiles”, especially at the time of their release. What I really had in mind, however, was the extent to which even A Bug’s Life ended up in the shadows of other movies before and since. It may be a “raw deal”, but it’s typical for any time and place where circumstances see the creation not just of a new genre but of a virtually new medium. Time may move on, yet those who were there will remember, which is exactly where people like me step in. And with that, I’m done for another day.