Notice any similarities in the ant character designs between Woody Allen voiced Antz and all new ant based CG animated film The Ant Bully coming out next week? The colours, texturres and angularity in the animation design all seems a bit familiar. And this is not a sequel to the previous film.
Actually I am all for this. Why waste the money inventing a totally new set of rules and designs for anthropomorphasizing ants, when you’ve already done it once. Do people complain that the people in films always look like the same type of people? There is more than one story to be told about ants after all. And Antz was one of the few times (if not the only time) Dreamworks beat Pixar – as I prefer Antz to A Bug’s Life. Still, here’s a review of The Ant Bully which seems to suggest that it runs like the communist manifesto for kids. Americans eh – McCarthism ain’t dead.
Antz was one of two ‘for kids’ things I experienced within a week that included the phrase “the workers control the means of production!”. The other being Grim Fandango, where it’s used by Construction Bees.