Insects take Hollywood; ANTZ epidemic at Apollo

It's been a few years since the first full-length computer-animated feature came out from Disney and Pixar in the form of Toy Story, but finally movie-going audiences get to see Hollywood's next attempt at this new cinematographic genre. The remarkable thing this time is that two different studios are releasing two computer-animated movies only a month and a half apart and, most significantly, the movies are about the same thing. Dreamworks' Antz came out before fall break and will open at the Apollo this Friday; Disney/Pixar will release A Bug's Life over Thanksgiving weekend. For connoisseurs of animation, here comes the buffet. For everyone else, the good money says that Antz is the movie to see of these two.

Considering that Antz is an animated feature and therefore necessarily geared for young audiences, it certainly capitalizes on some fine adult-oriented wit. Leaving aside the cool computer effects, what this movie certainly has going for it is some fine dialogue. Some big names were hired for the voices, leading off with Woody Allen and Sharon Stone. Allen manages to treat the audience to some of his classic neurotic monologuing, and some sociopolitical commentary manages to work itself quite nicely into the story.

Dreamworks works in some nice antie details, like eating another animal's feces. At one point the main character, Z (Allen), has a conversation with the severed head of one of his companions. When the trailer was first released, this movie had an R rating, but apparently was toned down for its actual release.

To compare Antz with its competitor, the easiest distinction is in the stylization of the insects. In Antz, the bugs are more angular and, frankly, more interesting, while Bug's Life is going more for the classic, cute, big round-eyed look that Disney has relied on in children's animation for more than half a century.

The similarity in subject matter is actually not as much of a coincidence as it may seem. In computer animation, each object is created virtually and then moved about. One major problem is that this technique runs into quite a problem when required to represent hair. The mother in Toy Story was forced to wear her hair up as a result of this problem. So, one fine solution is to have characters that are naturally hairless: thus the insects.

The only other major difference, it seems, is in the detail of the two movies. The trailers for Bug's Life display some interesting visual effects that never showed up in Antz which may have been a result of the rush at the Dreamworks studio to beat Pixar to the release. There is actually some interesting studio politics involved in the making of these two films which, frankly, has been beaten to death in other periodicals.

-Dan Roisman

Rating: There is nothing you could possibly be doing on Saturday or Sunday afternoon that is worth missing the matinee of this movie.