7 / 10
Official trailer
The Other Ant Film
Antz is the other ant film of 1998, and it’s the stranger of the two. It came out a month before Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, rushed into cinemas by DreamWorks in the middle of a very public feud. Antz is a completely different kind of film: a neurotic Woody Allen comedy about a worker ant who feels insignificant, wrapped around a surprisingly dark story about a general who wants to wipe out half the colony.
Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson directed it, the first animated feature from DreamWorks, made at Pacific Data Images.
It did well, and A Bug’s Life did better. I give it a 7. I admire Antz more than I enjoy it, and I respect it for trying to make a computer-animated film for adults before anyone knew such a thing was possible. It’s a cartoon about a genocidal general with Woody Allen whining on a therapist’s couch, and somebody had the nerve. That counts for a lot.
Z in Therapy
The film opens with Z, a worker ant, lying on a therapist’s couch, complaining about his life. He’s the middle child in a family of five million. He was never able to lift ten times his own body weight.
He feels insignificant, because in a colony built on everyone being the same, he’s insignificant. The therapist, voiced by Paul Mazursky, tells him that’s excellent progress.
It’s pure Woody Allen, lifted almost straight from his stand-up and his films, and it tells you immediately that this isn’t a typical children’s film. The jokes are about identity, anxiety and the absurdity of existence, and they’re aimed firmly at adults. Children who watch it tend to enjoy the action and miss most of the comedy.
Allen’s voice is perfect for Z: whiny, clever, self-deprecating and completely out of place in a society of cheerful conformists. It’s one of his best performances of the decade, and the film was built around it. The animators designed Z’s face to resemble Allen’s, down to the worried brow, and his body language, all hunched shoulders and fidgeting hands, is the nervous comedian in insect form.
For Writers
Antz opens with its hero on a therapist’s couch. One scene establishes his voice, his problem and the film’s tone, all through comedy.
When you write an opening, putting your character in a situation where they have to describe themselves can be a fast way to reveal who they are, if the description is funny or revealing.
Try opening with your character explaining their problem to someone who doesn’t quite understand. Let the gap between how they see themselves and how others see them reveal the character.
The Bar
Z meets Princess Bala in a worker bar, where she has gone slumming to escape her royal duties. The workers dance in rigid unison, every ant moving exactly the same way, and Z breaks the pattern with a wild, uncoordinated dance that enchants her and horrifies everyone else.
It’s the film’s key idea in a single scene: individuality as rebellion, one ant refusing to move like everyone else. It’s also very funny, because Allen’s awkward physical comedy works surprisingly well in animation.
Bala is intrigued, then embarrassed, then leaves, and Z is hooked. He has spent his whole life feeling like the one ant who doesn’t fit, and for a few minutes someone important noticed him for exactly that.
The bar dance is my favorite scene in the film. Every other ant stomps in lockstep while Z flails around like a man who’s never heard music, and Bala can’t take her eyes off him. It says everything the film wants to say in about a minute, and it makes me laugh out loud.
Sharon Stone voices Bala as a bored, sharp, impatient princess who is engaged to the colony’s top general and has no enthusiasm for it. She’s spoiled and imperious at first, and her trip with Z changes her. She ends up leading the colony alongside him, having learned from a neurotic worker what her royal upbringing never taught her.
Weaver
To see Bala again, Z persuades his friend Weaver, a soldier ant, to swap places with him for a day. Sylvester Stallone voices Weaver, and he’s excellent: a big, dim, good-hearted lug who agrees to anything a friend asks and ends up in the worker tunnels, digging.
There he falls for Azteca, a worker voiced by Jennifer Lopez, and discovers that the workers have their own ideas about the colony and their place in it. His subplot, about a soldier learning to think for himself, mirrors Z’s, and it gives the film’s argument about individuality a second, gentler voice.
Stallone’s warmth is a real asset. He plays Weaver as the kind of friend everyone should have, and his scenes with Lopez are sweeter than anything else in the film. It shows that Stallone, so often cast as a man of few words and many fists, has a real gift for gentle comedy when a film gives him room, and Antz gives him plenty.
The Termite War
Z, disguised as Weaver, is marched off with the soldier army to attack a termite colony, and the battle is the film’s most memorable sequence. The ants charge confidently into the mound, and the termites slaughter them. The termites spray acid, cut ants in half and overwhelm the survivors in minutes.
Z survives by hiding, and wakes among the dead, where the severed head of a dying soldier, voiced by Danny Glover, talks to him. It’s played partly for dark comedy, and it’s startling in a family film. The battle looks like a war film, and the aftermath looks like one too.
The termite battle is where Antz won me over. Nobody expects a DreamWorks cartoon to show ants cut in half and a dying soldier’s head talking from the pile, and the shock is the point. It’s the scene I’d point to if anybody called this a kids’ movie.
The army was sent there deliberately. General Mandible chose to sacrifice the soldiers loyal to the queen, and Z, returning alone, is hailed as a war hero. That only makes his situation more dangerous. The colony celebrates the one soldier who survived, and nobody asks why he survived or why the others didn’t, and Mandible has every reason to want him silenced before anyone does.
General Mandible
Gene Hackman voices Mandible, a militarist who believes the colony has grown weak and needs to be purged. His plan is to build a huge new tunnel, flood the colony, drown the queen and all the workers, and start again with a society made only of strong soldiers loyal to him.
It’s an astonishingly dark villain’s plan for an animated film, with obvious echoes of fascism and eugenics, and Hackman plays it with cold conviction. Mandible isn’t a cartoon. He believes he’s saving the colony, and his speeches about strength and purity are chilling in context.
That’s the best thing about Antz. It’s a children’s film in form, and in substance it’s about the kind of man who would kill thousands for an idea of order, and the ordinary individuals who refuse to go along. It never lectures. It simply shows a general’s plan, a soldier’s doubts and a worker’s refusal, and trusts older viewers to recognize the history behind them.
For Writers
Mandible’s plan is genocide in the name of strength, and he believes it completely. The villain is frightening because his logic is coherent.
Write out your antagonist’s philosophy in a paragraph, as they would explain it to a sympathetic listener. Then make every step of their plan follow from it. My piece on why villain motivations fall apart digs into this.
A villain’s big plan is scarier when it follows from a belief the villain holds sincerely.
Cutter
Christopher Walken voices Colonel Cutter, Mandible’s second-in-command, and he’s one of the film’s best characters. Cutter is loyal, calm and completely ruthless, the man who carries out Mandible’s orders without questioning them, until the moment he realizes what the plan is. He has served Mandible for years believing that the general wanted what was best for the colony, and he discovers, too late for many, that the general wanted only himself.
Then he chooses the colony. Walken’s strange, clipped delivery makes Cutter far more interesting than a henchman needs to be, and his turn at the end is moving. He’s the film’s picture of the soldier who finally sees what his loyalty has been used for. Walken is the reason I’d watch this again. Hackman gets the big speeches, but Cutter gets the turn, and Walken plays the moment he chooses the colony so softly that it sneaks up on me.
Insectopia
Z and Bala escape the colony together in search of Insectopia, a legendary paradise where insects live free with endless food.
Their trip takes them into the human world. It’s enormous and terrifying. They’re stuck in a boy’s shoe on a piece of gum, and they watch another insect burned to death by a child with a magnifying glass.
The magnifying glass scene is one of the darkest moments in any mainstream animated film of the nineties. It’s a stark reminder of how small and vulnerable they are. Two wasps, voiced by Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin as a bickering upper-class couple, carry them part of the way. That’s a brief, very funny scene.
Insectopia, when they find it, turns out to be a rubbish bin in a park, full of food and insects enjoying themselves.
This is a funny, deflating joke, and a typically adult one. Paradise is somebody else’s garbage. Z and Bala have a brief, happy time there, and then Mandible’s soldiers capture Bala and carry her back to the colony, and Z has to decide whether to stay in paradise or go home and fight for her.
For Writers
Insectopia turns out to be a rubbish bin. The promised paradise is real. It’s somebody else’s garbage, a joke that undercuts the whole idea of utopia.
Decide what your characters’ paradise really is, and let it be both what they hoped for and something much smaller. Let them decide whether it’s enough.
In a quest for a perfect place, the destination can say more about your story’s themes than the trip. A deflating reveal can be funnier and truer than a triumph.
The Ending
Z returns to the colony to warn everyone about Mandible’s plan, but the flood has already begun. The climax has the ants forming a living tower to climb to the surface and escape the rising water, every worker and soldier cooperating to save the colony and the queen.
It’s the film’s resolution of its big idea: individuality doesn’t mean abandoning the group. It means choosing to act together, freely, instead of being ordered to. Z becomes a hero by getting everyone to think for themselves and work together. Few children’s films attempt a message that complicated, and Antz handles it better than you’d expect.
Mandible dies in the collapse, and Cutter chooses the colony over him.
Z and Bala end up together, and the ants rebuild the colony with a little more room for individuals. For a Woody Allen character, that’s about as optimistic as it gets. Z doesn’t become a king or a general. He becomes an ordinary worker who is allowed to be himself, with the princess beside him, and the film treats that as the happiest ending there could be.
The Animation
Antz was only the second fully computer-animated feature, after Toy Story, and it looks rougher than A Bug’s Life, with plastic surfaces and simpler lighting.
The ants’ faces were designed to resemble their famous voice actors. It’s unsettling at times. Seeing Sylvester Stallone’s jaw and Christopher Walken’s hooded eyes on insects is either brilliant or creepy, depending on your mood, and the film never quite decides which it wants.
The look costs the film a few points with me. The surfaces look like cheap vinyl, and Stallone’s jaw on an ant is creepy more often than it’s funny. I understand it was early days, and Antz deserves credit for going first, but A Bug’s Life arrived a month later looking far more finished.
It has some great sequences: the huge underground colony, the termite battle, the flood and the human world seen from ground level. It proved DreamWorks could compete with Pixar technically, and it led directly to Shrek three years later. The same studio, many of the same animators and the same appetite for adult jokes in a family film all carried over, and Shrek refined the formula into something far more popular.
Harry Gregson-Williams and John Powell wrote the score, lively and big, with Latin rhythms in the bar and a military swagger in the war. The two would go on to score Shrek and Chicken Run, and you can hear their style forming here.
How It Plays Today
Antz is more interesting than it is enjoyable.
The humor is aimed at adults, the violence is surprisingly strong for a PG film, and Woody Allen’s presence is now more complicated than it was in 1998. It’s hard to recommend without those caveats. It’s also, in places, funny, and the jokes about conformity, bureaucracy and the tyranny of the group still land, perhaps more sharply now than they did in 1998.
It’s still worth watching for its ideas, its supporting cast, especially Hackman and Walken, and as a snapshot of animation in transition. Watch it alongside A Bug’s Life, and you’ll see two studios telling almost the same story in completely different ways, and you’ll understand a great deal about what both of them went on to become.
Craft Note
Craft Note
Antz takes a familiar genre, the underdog romance, and puts it inside a political satire. Z’s private wish to be different becomes the colony’s uprising, so his love story and the plot are the same story.
If you set a personal story against big events, the two often drift apart, and the reader has to choose which one to care about. Tie your hero’s private want to the public crisis so tightly that solving one solves the other. Every personal scene should push the larger plot forward.
The Verdict on Antz
It’s a 7, and I’m comfortable there. I’d watch it again for Hackman’s cold speeches, Walken’s quiet turn and the nerve of a cartoon whose villain plans to drown half the colony. The plastic-looking animation and a tone that can’t always decide between creepy and cute keep it out of the 8s. It’s darker than A Bug’s Life and less fun, and I still think it’s the braver of the two.
