Dreamworks at Its Worst

Antz

1998

D: Eric Darnell, Tim Johnson

**********

Pros: Technically Good Animation for the Time

Cons: Off-Putting Character Design, Lazy Humor, Awkward Tone

        I remember when Signs came out, and we all thought it was the greatest thing.  Then, once the novelty wore off, we realized it was an incredibly silly movie.  I’ve always been surprised by how Antz has somehow dodged this bullet.  It’s like everybody was impressed by all these new-fangled 3-D animated movies with hip metahumor and no music.  Considering the almost complete lack of any redeeming features in this film, there should have been an epiphany, but people still insist is a good movie.  I guess sometimes I have to take out the trash myself.

        There is some notorious controversy surrounding the production of this movie.  Dreamworks producer Jeffrey Katzenberger butted heads with Steve Jobs and John Lasseter of Pixar because both companies were making an animated movie about ants.  Whoever started the conflict is moot to me since A Bug’s Life is clearly the superior movie.  Colorful, cute, and passably entertaining, it borders between decent and watchable enough to watch with the kids, even if it’s not really Pixar’s best work.  Just about every one of Pixar’s movies at least passes the Park-a-Kid-in-Front-of-It-While-You-Do-Something-Else Test.  Heck, I’d even park a kid in front of Cars.*  Antz doesn’t even pass that test.  It’s hard to believe Dreamworks made this the same year they came out with the excellent Prince of Egypt.

        The movie’s protagonist Z (Woody Allen) is unsatisfied with life as a worker ant, as he explains to a therapist (Paul Mazursky) in the first scene (a lazy cliché meant for character exposition).  He goes to a bar and inadvertently meets and falls in love with Princess Bala (Sharon Stone), who is also unsatisfied with her life.  So we know already this is a cliched setup with a cliched romance between classes.  Z, wanting some change of scenery switches positions with a soldier ant friend named Weaver (Sylvester Stallone).  In the process, Weaver falls in love with a no-nonsense worker ant Azteca (Jennifer Lopez).  Coincidentally the villainous General Mandible (Gene Hackman) is scheming to destroy the colony and start a new one, and on this day he sends the soldier ants loyal to the Queen (Anne Bancroft) on a suicide mission against a colony of termites.  His conspiracy also involves tricking the worker ants into digging a tunnel straight into a puddle, drowning them.  Z and Bala have a typical isolated-from-society odd couple adventure before they finally thwart Mandible’s plan, save the colony, improve its social structure, and end up together as a couple.  Standard stuff, really.  At one point, there is a town of other insects that reinforces the suspicious similarity between this and A Bug’s Life.

       The casting is standard A-List celebrity stuff, and unlike in many such animated movies, it doesn’t justify itself with surprisingly good performances.  Every role is just a lazy caricature of an archetype each actor is generally typecast in.  The Lazy Self-Parody.  Christopher Walken, on the other hand, sounds a bit distracting as Cutter, a drone who acts as Mandible’s reluctant collaborator.  The one celebrity who works well in a movie is Danny Glover, who voices Barbatus, a soldier ant who befriends Z on his day in the military.  I’ve never liked Glover as an actor, but I’ve pointed out that his voice works in animation; it has a warm quality that fits this character.  When I cite Danny Glover as a redeeming feature in a movie, though, that’s a bad sign.  I’ve always had a bias toward using voice actors in voice roles, and it was nice to hear Jim Cummings voice an inconsequential extra in this movie.  Other voices include Grant Shaud, John Mahoney, and Jerry Sroka.

        The humor leaves much to be desired.  Many of the jokes are just clichés modified with formic terminology.  There are a few lazy references [Z at one point does a blatant Batman Twosie while dancing with Bala, and one of the few funny lines is lifted directly from Woody Allen’s Everything You Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask (“I was going to include you in my most erotic fantasies, but now you can just write it off”)].  Some animated movies are just watered-down mockeries of classic movies, and that’s what this is to Woody Allen movies.  There are a maybe couple decent lines, but they can be written off as flukes.  The movie has far more vulgar jokes and bad words than you’d expect a PG-animated movie to get away with, so much so that it seems like it’s using it as a crutch to look “edgy.”  

      Another problem that really screws with this movie’s tone is its awkward attempts at dark humor.  An ant is mesmerized and predictably vaporized by a magnifying glass.  A pair of snooty wasps (Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin) who speak with Mid-Atlantic accent (GET IT?) are such joke characters that I’m not sure I’m not supposed to be amused when one reacts appropriately to the other’s sudden and senseless death.  This problem even ruins a climactic scene involving a character’s death.  Barbatus’ fate is revealed after the Termite battle when he asks “Be honest, kid, am I hurt bad?” only to reveal that there is nothing left of him but his head.  The way the scene plays out makes it honestly confusing whether it’s meant to be funny or sad, and it ends up being ineffective.  The movie seems to mistake edginess for sophistication, but it would be better off it was consistently earnest in its darkness like The Lion King or a Don Bluth movie.

      Probably the most noticeable flaw with the movie is its look.  While the 3D Animation was  technically good for its time, it’s dominated by a drab color palette that doesn’t work well in early CGI, which usually tended to make things look shiny.  Instead, it looks grotesque and ugly.  And then there are the character designs.  Unless you’re trying to be subversive or you’re making a horror movie, then it’s generally a good idea to heed a widely-recognized rule of design that non-human things with human faces are incredibly creepy and off-putting.  That’s just common sense.  Now there are some rules this doesn’t apply to: generally humanoid characters with non-human attributes (Gargoyles and Na’vi) and cartoonishly bipedal characters (Bee Movie), but these characters are literally ants with human faces.  Who would want to stare at that for 80 minutes?  This gets even more frustrating when you look at some of the concept art for the characters:

Wow, look at these creative, colorful, and appealing designs, and this…

…this is what they freaking went with?!   

It’s also worth noting that the conceptual designs would be more suited to the limitations of the animation at the time. The chitinous surfaces would look less off-putting if you didn’t need to flex them like facial skin.  There’s an interesting contrast between this fecklessness and Pixar’s prudence.  Pixar recognized that the technology was new so they made their first movie about toys while keeping human characters in the background for practice until they were finally confident enough to make a movie about them.

        I find it rather odd that the same people who still like Antz seem to hate Shark Tale, even though practically everything that was wrong with Shark Tale was wrong with Antz.  In fact, I even think Shark Tale, for all its flaws and piscine puns, had far more funny moments than Antz, and a nicer color palette to boot.  It’s an example of people reacting to a follow-up the way they should have reacted to the first work (The Cars 2 Effect).  Even more baffling, the same people also dis on Bee Movie, which actually was the funny, clever satire Antz should have been.  Antz kicked off the typ of hip, knowing humor of early CG animation that Dreamworks later did much better with Shrek even though we eventually got tired of it. 

*Not literally, of course.

QUOTES:

[after lengthy insecure rant]

Z: The whole system makes me feel... insignificant!

THERAPIST: Excellent. You've made a real breakthrough.

Z: I have?

THERAPIST: Yes, Z.  You have.  You are insignificant.

Z: So, these... these termites, they're... they're, they're... these guys aren't going to put up much of a fight, right? I mean, we're talking about pushovers, right?

BARBATUS: Not really, kid. They're five times our size and spit acid from their foreheads.

BARBATUS: [dying] Don't make my mistake, kid. Don't follow orders your whole life. Think for yourself.

Z: And... you know, he just died in my arms like that. I... You know, I don't think he ever once, in his life, made his own choice