What Tom Hanks wants, Tom Hanks gets.

That’s the lesson I learned watching the animated film, The Ant Bully (2006). The story goes that Tom Hanks used to read a children’s story called The Ant Bully to his kids every night, and decided it would make a great full length animated feature. So he reached out to John A. Davis and said, “make it so.” And John did it. (The big coward.)

Someone should have probably stood up to the big Hollywood bully, Forrest Gump, and warned him that Pixar and Dreamworks (and Disney and many others) had already made a few animated / kid’s movies about insects (Antz), bugs (A Bug’s Life), and shrinkage (Honey, I Shrunk the Kids). But no one said NO to Tom, so they made yet another cartoon about ants. And inexplicably Nicolas Cage signed on.

Which means I had to watch it. And now, ugh, I have to write a blog about it. 

To start, it’s not the most horrible animated movie I’ve seen and it’s not even the worst one Nicolas Cage has played a part in (see The Christmas Carol: A Movie review for that one.) But really, the most impressive part of the whole thing is the cast that they enlisted to take part in this questionable script and story.

So I thought it would be fun to provide you with a little quiz game I created to familiarize yourself with the celebrity cast. If you’ve seen Ant Bully this might be a simple matching exercise, but I imagine I will stump you with a few of them.

Click on this link / image to get started. (Quiz will launch in a new window. For best experience, try on laptop / tablet and not a smart phone or other mobile device.) Then return here and let me know how you scored in the comments. I’m curious if anyone can ace this thing. 

Click to launch Celebrity Match Quiz:

The World According to Zoc

In brief, here’s the shortest summary you’ll ever get from me: A boy gets bullied by some kids. He in turn bullies ants. The ants, who have the power of sorcery, shrink him down to teach him a lesson. He has to become an ant as penance and to learn empathy. In doing so, he learns how to value the collective over the individual. He saves the ant colony from an “evil” exterminator and returns to human form. He pays it forward to the ants in Jelly Belly’s “sweet rocks”.

Sound interesting to you? Me neither. There were really only three reasons this movie was watchable for me.

1. Nicolas Cage gets to play a sarcastic wizard ant. Why? Who the hell knows why? I can’t imagine this was at all part of the original story, but Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter were all the rage in the early aughts, so I have to imagine some genius writer said, “Yeah, let’s make Zoc a wizard ant. Wizards are in!” I actually love the fact that Cage is so Cageous in this one and heaps on a heavy dose of sarcasm into his many frustrations. (Would have a bit better if it could have gotten an R-rating with a few of his select characteristic “f-bombs,” but I suppose that would have defeat the whole purpose of “kid’s movie.”

2. Bruce Campbell. How is it Nicolas Cage and Bruce Campbell were cast in the same movie?!? And why isn’t it a live action movie that harnesses both of their limitless potential for mayhem? In college I must have watched Army of Darkness a couple dozen times with roommates.  It’s the epitome of the cult classic in my opinion. Campbell’s mostly harmless chauvinism that masks a deeper insecurity works so well in this PG environment, and his character’s attempt to woo Kreela and flex his charm and bumbling male dominance are pretty funny throughout. Especially because as John Davis puts it, “he has the best male scream” of any actor. 

2. Paul Giamatti. He wasn’t as funny to me as Bruce, but he plays a decent villain in this one. A kind of slimy blue collar guy who, although he’s just trying to do his job, kind of gets what’s coming to him in the end. As a homeowner (who battles both wasps and ants) I’m not sure I agree with the movie’s message or even understand it (i.e. don’t bully insects, they are people too, but I enjoyed seeing Sam Beals, the Cloud Breather. 

Weird Shit of Note in Ant Bully

• The grandma who believes in aliens. Lily Tomlin plays Lucas’ grandmother who believes in aliens. But aliens don’t really come into play at all in this film. I guess she believes that’s how Lucas gets shrunken down, but it’s not very clear. If Pixar had set up the alien conspiracy theorist granny, they would have used it somehow. I did appreciate the intentional callback to The Incredibly Shrinking Woman and the garbage disposal scene. 
• Ants say “cross my heart” and then cross their butt. I get that this is where their heart is (haha, very funny), but it’s still dumb. I bet most kids don’t even get it, but maybe they laugh anyway?
• Meryl Streep. It’s strange to me that she is in this. Just why? 
• Ricardo Montelban. This was the last film he appeared in before his death in 2009. 
• Some of the aspects of this were kind of creepy.  The ants remind me of “skitters” (from Falling Skies) and the wasps remind me of Sentinels (The Matrix). 
• Too many gross moments for even my most middle school self to appreciate (nose hairs, dandruff / mites, farmer’s blow, bug bite to junk, wasp sting to plumber’s crack, inside the frog’s belly). 
• DNA Productions was the company that did the animation for this. It had a $50M budget for The Ant Bully. Shortly before the film was released, most of the employees had been laid off because of the performance of previous film The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius.
• Toads. I enjoyed the big toads in this movie. They were a welcome surprise. Wonder if any of them are Sonoran River Toads. Those toads can really blow your mind.

Firsts for Nicolas Cage as Zoc

• First time on screen as an animated insect
• First time as a wizard with a staff
• Intimidating a child
• Inside the belly of a toad

Recurrences

• Animated character (A Christmas Carol: The Movie)
• Working as a scientist (of sorts) to create compounds (The Rock)

Quotable Zoc

“Away monster, or I will use my powers to destroy you! Powers that I… have yet to perfect.”

“Knock-teal”

“Praise the mother!” 

“Craz-knocks!”

“The potion is supposed to change COLOR. It’s not changing color. It’s not CHANGING COLOR!”

‘wHAt a GreAt IdeA?”

“Oh yay! Yay! He saved us…Praise the Destroyer! WAKE UP! HE SAVED HIMSELF!”

“Remember you only get one shot at it. Don’t fire until you see the wax of his ears.”

Conclusion:

I don’t have more to say about this movie, except I’m 1) glad it’s off the books and 2) I’m really looking forward to seeing Nicolas Cage as wizard in the flesh. (Just 13 more movies till we get there.)