The Ant Bully (2006)
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The Ant Bully Movie Review
The Ant Bully is a 2006 animated fantasy film directed by John A. Davis and starring Julia Roberts and Nicolas Cage. It’s a flawed, but solid and fun animated flick.
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“Human. Come with us“
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After Lucas Nickle floods an ant colony with his water gun, he’s magically shrunken down to insect size and sentenced to hard labor in the ruins. This film is pretty much ‘Antz’, but with the added plot element of miniaturization. Thus, it wasn’t really original and it stayed familiar throughout. But that didn’t prevent me from enjoying it as it’s fun and charming enough.
The humor in this movie is actually pretty good with some endearing and memorable gags. There is also excellent world building employed with the ant world seeming large, detailed and very much lived in. Thematically speaking, it’s problematic as it teaches kids some communist/socialist ideas, but this will probably fly over their heads, so it’s only really there for adults to notice.
When it comes to its characters, The Ant Bully has a solid roster of fun personalities and likable characters. Zoc and Hova are both very likable and fun and I loved their dynamic with the protagonist, who is this former bully who of course changes his ways later down the line. Apart from Lucas, the human characters are sidelined and forgettable while The Queen Ant was among the most memorable and interesting ant creations.
The Ant Bully features solid CGI animation that must have looked splendid back in 2006, but now it’s somewhat dated and rough. The character designs worked and the movie is well detailed and having a solid color palette, but the overall unpolished and 2000s look to it made it far from timeless.
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The score is pretty good, the pacing is just right and the movie pretty much flies by. It’s fun, suitably exciting in some well executed action scenes and reasonably humorous too. I just wished for a more meaningful and emotional storyline as this one lacked depth. The dialogue is surprisingly strong, but the film needed that special sauce of artistic animation, great messaging and memorable characters to take it to the next level. But even without those things, it’s quite underrated and solid, not deserving the hate that it got from most viewers.
The Ant Bully does have some rather dated 2000s CGI animation and its storyline is far from original. Still, the movie worked because its humor was solid, the world building was excellent and it was constantly fun, exciting and charming. The characters are solid albeit far from great while the dialogue is pretty good, though the thematic resonance was slim here. It’s an underrated flick that is flawed, but pretty solid in its own right.
My Rating – 3.5
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