Antz

Antz

“Antz” celebrates that a cartoon is capable of anything. It is so unrestricted that it flips through images. It enters a microscopic world an ant colony beneath Central Park and turns it into a universe so huge and threatening that comparisons with “Star Wars” are not out of place.

And it’s sharp and funny not a children’s movie, but one of those hybrids that works on different levels for different ages. The kids will laugh when the hero and his girl get stuck in some gum on the bottom of a running shoe. Adults will understand the hero’s complaint: “It’s not easy being the middle child in a family of five million.”

The film is DreamWorks’ first feature length animation, and benefits from the participation of studio partners Jeffrey Katzenberg, who earlier supervised Disney animation’s renaissance, and Steven Spielberg, whose “E.T.” seems to have inspired the look of the hero’s eyes and a crucial scene where a kiss brings him back to life. The movie is entirely computer-generated, using an ingenious software program that makes the mouths of the insects resemble but not too much morphs of the actors (Woody Allen, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Jennifer Lopez, Gene Hackman Christopher Walken).

The story combines adventure with political parable. At first every ant in the colony dutifully goes about its age-old assignment without thinking why some are workers or warriors and only one can be queen. Then little Z (voice by Woody Allen) develops an attribute no ant colony has any time for: He thinks for himself. “I’m supposed to do everything for the colony?” he asks on a psychiatrist’s couch. “And what about my needs?”

This is no time for individualism; The colony has launched into an emergency project to dig an opening as wide as Madison Avenue (in ant-scale it looks as daunting as The Chunnel). Militarists led by Gen. Mandible (Gene Hackman) and Col. Cutter ( Christopher Walken) want to divert all resources to war; they invent even false reports of an approaching termite invasion, and convince the queen (Anne Bancroft) that they must strike first.

Meanwhile, in a bar, Z meets the beautiful Princess Bala (Sharon Stone). All the other ants “dance” with a rigid precision that looks, well, more or less insect-like. But Z breaks loose; and Bala, intoxicated by the sudden freedom of movement, regrets her engagement to Mandible. Like all ants, he’s predictable.

Z meets a warrior ant (Sylvester Stallone) and arranges to switch jobs just so he can impress Bala. Bad timing. Z finds himself hurled into battle against vastly superior termites; surviving this, he returns to the colony as the seed for a virus of individualism. Eventually Z and Bala find themselves alone on the surface, in search of the legendary Insectopia (a picnic), and menaced by huge beasts of man and nature that rear above them like Darth Vader’s Death Star

I have a deep love for animation, any kind of animation. (When I was a kid, I even thought it was more real than live-action because the lines were crisper and the characters explained themselves.) Among other things, modern animation is ironic in that it can literally depict any possible physical action in any imaginable artistic style, but most of the successful ones are done in the Disney studio style as it has evolved over the years.

That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with Disney movies; far from it. I love most of them, especially the early ones and the modern renaissance. But there are other ways for a cartoon to look. The Japanese master Hayao Miyazaki (“My Neighbor Totoro”) has developed a look with the fanciful style of great children’s book illustration (his “Kiki’s Delivery Service” has just appeared on video).

“Toy Story,” by Disney and Pixar, used computer animation to create a new world with its own fresh and exciting look. Japanese anime titles like “Akira” and “Ghost In The Shell” move closer to hard-edged science fiction.

Look at those panoramic overhead shots of the ant colony in “Antz.” We could be looking at an alien life form or one of James Bond’s megalomaniacal headquarters; scale and detail both boggle. And think about having us watch while most of a colony’s ants gather themselves into a giant ball held by others so that millions can function as one tool.

There are many such sequences during which inspiration comes from facts about real ants’ lives: A scene where an ant is decapitated and Z has a conversation with his head; nursemaids in perpetual procession as queen delivers newborn every five seconds; funny scene where ants drink nectar from aphids’ hindquarters while Z complains, “I may be crazy but I have this thing about drinking from another creature’s anus”; visually exciting sequence in which an ant is trapped inside body of water and struggles with power of its surface tension.

The visuals are matched by a screenplay with wickedly amusing dialogue and lots of cross references to current culture. (“All we are saying,” chant an ant chorus, “is give Z a chance!” Hero is later told, “You de ant!”) Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson co-directed the film; Todd Alcot, Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz wrote it; and these filmmakers have led a team of talented animators in telling a fable that resonates like Animal Farm. Some lines have Woody Allen’s satirical spirit sneaking between them; why not try subverting the termites with campaign contributions instead of attacking them?

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