Word: ante
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...there, from the Manhattan skyline to Woody driveling anxiety to his shrink, the first moments of Antz suggest a film destined to become another prototypical Woody Allen movie. Or so it seems until Woody (now an ant named "Z") gets off the psychoanalyst's couch and walks into "The Colony." Hardly the accustomed venue for paranoid melodrama, the computer generated image of a million humanoid ants carrying around gargantuan dirt clods seems to belong more to a Charleton Heston flick than to a movie whose hero is characterized by unrelenting nervousness...
Incongruity aside, this first pan through the Ant Colony is sure to be the newest addition to the hall of mainstream animation fame. Like the Wildebeast stampede in The Lion King or the ballroom sequence in Beauty and the Beast it is difficult not to be enraptured by this visual tour of the capital of ant farms. As you'd expect, listening to Woody Allen complain about "never being able to lift more than ten times his body weight" is funny, but in Antz, it is the panorama that steals the show. The casting choices made by Dream Works...
...example of this, Z, dissatisfied with his workaday life, kidnaps the Colony's princess and escapes with her to the fabled "Insectopia." Though the movie is long enough to be boring, the ants' trip into the uncolonized wilderness is short shifted. Rather than saying some key lines about what it's like to be the arthropodic equivalent of Adam and Eve, Z and Princes Bala (voiced by Sharon Stone) get captured in a giant dewdrop and spend more time than is interesting interred in gum on the bottom of some kid's shoe (allowing unusual camera angles that will really...
...plot couldn't be more typical. Z (Allen) is one of two individualistic ants in a colony which (like any good super-organism) demands subservience if it is to survive. Depressed by his insignificance, Z follows his heart and breaks the rules to court the Princess Bala (Stone). Gump-style, Allen becomes a war hero and accidentally escapes with the princess, inciting the colony to rebellion by his example of disobedience. As it turns out, the insubordinance is well timed, since the Colony's other individualistic ant (voiced by Gene Hackman), has plans to work the colony to death...
Sometimes it really is a small, small world. Next week DreamWorks--the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen--opens its first cartoon feature, Antz. The computer-animated story of life in an ant colony, Antz features the voices of Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone and Dan Aykroyd. In November Pixar, the creator of Toy Story, and Disney, the studio where Katzenberg was chairman for 10 years, plan to release A Bug's Life, which also happens to be the computer-animated story of life in an ant colony. It features the voices of NewsRadio...