If you could go back to 1998 (something that I would give serious consideration to by the way), you would find that the computer generated animated feature film was in its infancy. All that existed prior was Pixar’s Toy Story. Suddenly the powers-that-be had insects on their collective minds as the subject for best exploiting the new medium.
In fact a very strong argument could be made that it was these bug flicks of 1998 that firmly cemented a rivalry between DreamWorks and Pixar that is still going strong today some 12-years later.
Interestingly, while Disney/ Pixar’s A Bug’s Life followed the more traditional path of basically turning a classic family-oriented 2D feature into the 3D domain, Antz actually comes off as an animated incarnation of a classic Woody Allen picture, complete with all of the adult gags that make his work so endearing. Picture the insecurities, the esteem issues, the “what is the meaning of life” angles that make summarize the Woody Allen experience but coupled to a solid children’s medium (complete with the nice clean character designs and a well-constructed user-friendly plot).
The story tells of one Z-4195 (Z for short), a neurotic worker ant amidst a family of 5-million strong.
Z is in therapy because he's an individual in a colony where conformity is not only desirable, but also mandatory for daily survival. One night, while at a bar, he dances with the incognito Princess Bala and immediately becomes obsessed with her.
After much scheming, he ends up presenting a plan to his soldier-class ant friend Weaver for a day. Things go terribly wrong, however, when the evil General Mandible declares war on a nearby termite colony and poor Z finds himself in the heat of battle.
Truth be told, Antz makes very valid use of the ideal that hindsight is often much clearer. Now that computer-generated features are no longer in their infancy, it’s clear that Antz was actually grittier and more subtly mature than most of the animated films of recent years. The language is a little bit sharper (a few cusses), there are some intense visuals (a battle scene that looks as if it were transplanted directly from 1997’s Starship Troopers, the dying decapitated head of one of Z’s friends), and a little bit of nastiness that could make an adult squirm (a gondola ride through a rotting fish head, some bugs eating a chunk of feces and so on).
Make no mistake, these aren’t deterrents to the “fun for all ages” aspect of the film so much as they are interesting little signs of the whole genre’s evolution toward kid-friendliness. Many of these gags simply wouldn’t fly today even in a DreamWorks picture, which, I typically consider to be the most adult of the current animation studios.
In all Antz is quite enjoyable on many levels and in my opinion, superior to the generally considered impeccable, A Bug’s Life. There is enough cuteness and morality to keep the kiddies involved but the humor is such that adults may even enjoy it more than the youngsters. How often can that be said about an animated film, really?
