INDULGING OUR INNER CHILDREN: "ANTZ"

I guess the new and high level of technology available to all these days is setting the standard higher for everyone, but I feel that animations especially have really gone their own way. More and more of the greats – I mean the great actors – lend their voices to animated characters, the worlds created in studios, be it Pixar, Dreamworks or Disney are more and more extravagant. It’s time for animations to up their game slightly. It’s like the job market; there comes that time when everyone has a degree, getting a masters is what one has to do to stand out… Now Antz, I felt, combined just enough of everything, to the point that we can say with some confidence that even if they haven’t hit on the ideal combo, they are pretty damn close. The actors are talented, the “new world” is, if not original definitely imaginative and the story is, if not actually completely original, chock full of witticisms that make it easy to forgive any banality on its part. Cheeky is the word I’m looking for. For this little number we are headed off underground; and no less than the great Wood Allen lends his voice to Z, an ant with an attitude problem.
But this is not some kind of typical “Woody Allen” attitude problem. In fact by some standards Z might well be considered a rather usual, typical ant/person. The problem is that he has an attitude at all. He has his own personal outlook on stuff. He doesn’t want to be like the rest of the crowd. He has a mind of his own. This is definitely NOT a good thing if you live in an ant colony. But while Z is yet to figure out how exactly to survive in the colony; he is forced head-first, first into love with possibly the one woman /ant in the anthill that is completely inaccessible to him and then into the heart of an intrigue that may well determine the fates of thousands of his fellow-ants… The question is, will Z be able to get his act together and rescue his relationship AND the colony?
Now as you can see as far as the story goes, this is nothing original. Nothing original AT ALL. However, and I don’t want to point them all out to you one by one but there are some little humorous touches that made me laugh out loud. The thing with animations is that when you do sit down to watch them – with me this is always the case at any rate – you don’t expect anything too complex. That’s why when you see all the small references they seem to count even more. Still, I like the way being competitive has pushed the genre to be better – even though I am no great fan of mass commercialization. In the humor present in this movie I also felt a touch of Woody Allen. It could be psychological of course, simply because I knew Allen was in the film, because fair is fair his name is not stated as one of the writers but still… And the rest of the cast do a pretty fine job too; Sharon Stone is Princess Baka (Z’s love interest) and Christopher Walken (always a steady favorite of mine), Gene Hackman, Sylvester Stallone (of whom I hadn’t heard of in donkey’s years) and Jennifer Lopes (don’t snort, she actually does a good job of it here =) ). In short, the movie achieves nothing completely original, one has to be fair. It is a bit of a classic example. But unlike most “classics” it is has a lot of sensitivity and originality in it, it is obvious that a lot of thought has gone into the making of it and that gives it quality. Class. Highly recommended, chuckles guaranteed.