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In his favourite position at the outset of the film, Woody's multi-legged alter ego is lying on the psychiatrist's couch bemoaning his caste in the ant colony. For alas, he is a common labourer. "I'm not cut out for construction work," he cries, adding "I can only lift 10 times my body weight." While inundated throughout the ant world with propaganda asserting that he is living in a worker's Valhalla, Z feels there must be something better.
"I feel so insignificant," he tells the therapist. With that, the doctor happily announces that Z has made a breakthrough. "I have?" Z excitedly asks. "Yes," retorts the shrink, "You are insignificant." With such vintage Woodyisms peppering the script, it's hard to believe that Mr. Allen didn't supply ad-libs to the screenplay by Todd Alcott, Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz.
Later, at a worker bar where the ants drown their sorrows in aphid beer (with the aphids themselves serving as live mugs), Z continues his self-pitying tirade. Best friend Weaver, a soldier class ant more accepting of his fate, tries to assuage his little buddy. In his most credible performance since Rocky, Sylvester Stallone finally finds thespian success as Weaver's voice. As all the characters are drawn with slight allusion to their behind-the-scenes human, Mr. Stallone's cartoon caricature comically exaggerates his protuberant chin.
"There has to be a better place," wails Z, not aware that his self-centred dissatisfaction will ultimately foment glorious revolution. An elderly, downtrodden sot crying in his aphid tells our disgruntled worker that there is indeed a better place.....Insectopia.....he's seen it. But it isn't until Z meets Princess Bala (Sharon Stone), slumming in the worker bars for a little fun and excitement, that his raison d'être is reinvigorated. She vanishes as quickly as she appeared. So he hatches a plan to switch places with his soldier friend; there's going to be a military review at the royal manse, and that'll give Z another chance to hook-up with her highness.
Meanwhile, back at the castle, the evil General Mandible (Gene Hackman) has plans for total dominion over the colony. Having inveigled the Queen (Anne Bancroft) to see things his way, the unsavoury demagogue has consolidated troops loyal to him and won the hand, er, leg, of the comely Princess Bala. Yecch! No wonder she was cruising the bars.
Allen hasn't inhabited a loveable shlumpff this pure since Bananas. Z is the classic innocent. He is the little guy who, by virtue of his petty concerns, realises his own humanity (or is it antanity?) in spite of himself. And then, quite by accident, he stumbles into nothing less than a fight to save civilisation. The hapless hero is one of Hollywood's finest comic traditions, inaugurated by Chaplin, honed by Buster Keaton, and then refined by Hope. Allen took up the mantle in the '60's, and now in the '90's conjures enough chutzpah to give it this cartoon permutation.
While in great part light and philosophically humorous, Antz also makes heavy use of a dark and sinister mood - sometimes questionable if not to its detriment. Battle scenes are vivid, and surprisingly few punches are pulled when the fascist General Mandible extols genocide as a means to his end. This makes it difficult to discern how suitable its albeit PG-rated pronouncements are for children. The socio-political lessons about class structure are worth learning at any age, but children under ten will have to depend on osmosis to absorb some of the more sophisticated precepts.
Directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson, the allegory plays like a synthesis of Great Anthropomorphic Fairy Tales. There's a dab of Charlotte's Web, lots of Animal Farm, and a general smattering of Aesop's Fables. But the overriding theme of individualism vs. totalitarianism has the unmistakable temper of Orwell's 1984.
The computer animation achieves a look that recalls the cyberplasmic texture of Toy Story. But while that movie's characters and sets were playroom-bright and colourful, the proletariat expanse of the ant colony is industrially brooding. Coated in civil service brown and green, it brings to mind the hauntingly surreal look of a Hieronymous Bosch painting.
Along the way to moulding his diminutive hero amidst the Byzantine intrigue of ant life, Woody Allen pulls a little political coup of his own. You'll remember it was just yesterday that Mia Farrow was charging the filmmaker with gross lechery, chasing him through the headlines with a rolling pin. And his last film, Deconstructing Harry, played like damage control, a cynical apology for his trespasses both large and small. But now, in the guise of an unsullied insect, Woody re-emerges the guileless virgin. David Copperfield could take a lesson from this showman. Kvetching and creeping his way back into our good graces in Antz, it's enough to make you buggy.
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