Antz 1998, Rated PG Dreamworks Home Entertainment

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Starring Woody Allen, Sharon Stone. Released to DVD on February 9, 1999.

While the plot in A Bug's Life is a modern retelling of the Aesop's Fable, The Grasshopper and the Ants, Antz took a slightly darker path, investigating individualism, predestined societal placement, and one's unhappiness with work rather than the normal happy feelings of animated woodland creatures.

Who better to voice the lead in this more adult animated feature than the man currently involved with his daughter, Woody Allen? Allen voices the lead as 'Z', a nebbish worker ant who has been relegated to working in Central Park. Z is tiring of his niche in the ant world, wants to see the rest of New York, experience new avenues of pleasure, but particularly desires to try a different venue of work. At a chance encounter, Z meets and falls in love with Princess Bala, voiced by Sharon Stone. Realizing that he will never be able to catch the princess' eye as a simple worker ant, Z convinces his best friend Weaver, Sylvester Stallone, a soldier, to change places with him for a day. As soon as the two switch, Gene Hackman's General Mandible orders the ants to battle and, faster than you can whip out your magnifying glass, Z has become a war hero. When the populace learns that Z is just a worker, a movement in free-thinking begins, much to the displeasure of the Stallinistic Mandible.

One of the biggest differences between these two computer generated insect movies, aside from the fact that the ants in Antz were brown and the ants in A Bug's Life were blue, is the target audience of the films. A Bug's Life was a children's movie, complete with cute characters that would make great stuffed animals and moments of genuine comedy. Antz, on the other thorax, is a more dramatic film geared for adults, with a rather surprising battle scene-remember, it is lizards who can regrow body parts that come off, not ants-and a lead in Mandible spouting communist rhetoric at seemingly every possible opportunity.

But this is not to detract from the quality of the production. Antz is, on its own six feet, an enjoyable film. The constant nature of the product placement did, at times, become slightly annoying, but Todd Alcot and Chris Weitz's script was clever and some of the more subtle, throw-away lines were downright hysterical.

The animation in Antz was very good, but directors Eric Darnell and Lawrence Guterman were at a distinct disadvantage when compared to the A Bug's Life Pixar team; Pixar had worked out a lot of the bugs in their production schedule on their first full-length feature, Toy Story.

The voice casting was solid, with Stallone especially delivering an entertaining and self-deprecating performance as Weaver, and the script clever. However, when it comes to matters of animation, with the exception of the works of Ralph Bakshi, the cuter, warmer, and fuzzier, the better. This was one production element that Antz was slightly lacking. Both computer generated insect movies were fun to watch, but A Bug's Life stood out as being the better of the two. See A Bug's Life.