If Antz was Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead tweaked as kiddie animation, then The Ant Bully might just be Das Kapital for tykes. Both movies put us up close and personal with a colony of plucky, stylized ants, but the inevitable life lessons learned seem to point in different (albeit equally warm and fuzzy) directions. Antz celebrated heroic individualism; the somewhat blander The Ant Bully extols the virtues of collective teamwork, but both movies culminate in group hugs and are cut from pretty much the same generic cloth.
The story here concerns Lucas (Zack Tyler Eisen), a 10-year-old boy who takes out his frustrations on an ant hill, gets shrunk down to ant-size by a bug wizard (Nicolas Cage), and then must live among the colony until he proves to its six-legged inhabitants that he's got the right stuff. Exciting adventures ensue involving ominous wasps and hungry bullfrogs, sprinkled periodically with touchy-feely moments, uplifting speeches, and culminating in a life-or-death showdown with an obsessed exterminator (Paul Giamatti).
There's nothing terribly original about The Ant Bully and the movie tends to get a bit too chatty for its own good, but the CGI animation looks good, the action scenes are well mounted and frequent, and the humor refreshingly inoffensive and well-suited for the film's primary target audience of sub-teens. Fans of Jimmy Neutron, the Nickelodeon television series created by Ant Bully director John A. Davis, will basically know what to expect. Featuring the voices of Nicolas Cage, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti and Zack Tyler Eisen.
This article appears in Jul 26 – Aug 1, 2006.