7/30/2023 0 Comments Antz battle sceneWith all the characters there are so many relationships and friendships to keep track. What kind of workers paradise is this place? I don’t know but it is just kind of all over the place. The ants are kept under strict routines and follow orders yet there is a long sequence at a bar where ants drink quite a bit including the princess (she’s sneaking but still). Some of the rules of the world building also don’t make sense. It’s tonally all over the place with a massive battle scene happening one minute and playful banter at an ant landfill the next. While it can be fun to have all these plot points and characters. Most I wouldn’t be able to tell apart if it wasn’t for the voice actors. And not only do they have all of these characters, but they all look the same with the brown color palate. I counted 16 named characters with vocal work. There are also a ton of characters in Antz. I never know quite what it is going to do or what is happening next. This can make it unpredictable and fun to watch. It’s at all times a romcom, war, dystopian, road trip, fantasy, prison escape and children’s movie all in one. It combines 8 different kinds of movies into one. On the other hand, the main strength of Antz is how nutty and strange it is. However, the movie does move away from him for long stretches with subplots involving a soldier named Weaver, a princess named Bala and a worker ant named Azteka. I’m used to him as more of an R rated figure and so it’s a bit jarring to hear his voice and type of ramblings in a Dreamworks movie. It feels like such an odd choice to have Woody Allen waxing philosophical in a kid’s ant movie. There are a lot of jokes meant for adults in this movie, and many of these come from Allen with his deadpan style of humor. The lead character in Antz is a neurotic bug named Z voiced by Woody Allen. A Bug’s Life is more of a traditional hero narrative where Antz is a hodge-podge of story elements focusing more on the colony than on one particular ant. In my opinion Antz is the inferior film over A Bug’s Life but aside from being ants they are actually quite different. Then in a very fishy move Dreamworks also developed their own ant movie under Katzenberg’s leadership, Antz. At the same time, executive Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney in a feud with then CEO Michael Eisner. Let’s start with the controversy: After the success of Toy Story in 1995, Pixar began developing their next picture that would revolve around a colony of ants. This film was not only loaded with controversy but has more subplots, characters and ideas than it knows what to do with. Today we get to look at one of the oddest entries in the Dreamworks Canon- their 1998 film Antz.
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