No, this is not a rip-off of “Antz” or “A Bug’s Life.” It’s just that insects are so convenient to create with digital animation.
This is “The Ant Bully,” no relation to previous insect adventures. Its heritage predates those early computer-animated movies, all the way to “Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.”
Meet Lucas (voiced by Zach Tyler), a nerdy boy on the block. He’s bullied by the local toughs, and in turn he torments the ant colony residing in the middle of his family’s front lawn. An innocent squirt gun can wreak considerable damage to someone the size of, well, an ant.
We know this because we enter the colony, cozying up to a wizard named Zoc (Nicolas Cage), who’s working on a potion that could neutralize the enemy. It works: Lucas is shrunk down to ant size, where he faces a choice. He can accept punishment, or learn how to see things from an ant’s point of view.
There is a not-very-veiled lesson here about violence and warfare and learned behavior, which is laid on a little thicker than most kids will have the patience for. You have to wait around for the climactic duel with an exterminator (Paul Giamatti) for the really goofy slapstick to kick in.
The latter battle has some unique moments, including a close-up view of the exterminator’s scalp, which looks like the surface of the moon with a few weeds sticking out of it.
Cage and Julia Roberts are the needlessly big-shot names hired to pump some life into the roles (Meryl Streep does a cameo as a queen ant). They are easily outshined by the rich Corinthian leather tones of Ricardo Montalban, who plays an ant council member.
Some of the ant’s-eye view animation is fun, but the insects themselves aren’t very fetching. Every once in a while a stray sight gag will pop, like the moment a firecracker goes off in the lawn – a momentous event to the ants, but (as we are reminded by a cut to a far distance) a soft poof to the big world.
Coming from the director of “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius,” which was a pleasant surprise a few years ago, this film is a disappointment. It inadvertently reminds us that cartoons almost always thrive in the world of crazy slapstick action, and less so in the realm of profound social lectures.
“The Ant Bully” is an animated film featuring ants and a human boy brought down to ant-size.
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