Bugging out

Antz is a moviegoers' picnic

by Gary Susman

ANTZ, Directed by Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson. Written by Todd Alcott, Chris Weitz, and Paul Weitz. With Woody Allen, Dan Aykroyd, Anne Bancroft, Jane Curtin, Danny Glover, Gene Hackman, Jennifer Lopez, John Mahoney, Paul Mazursky, Grant Shaud, Sylvester Stallone, Sharon Stone, and Christopher Walken. A DreamWorks Pictures release.

Woody Allen's latest starring role is typically Allen-esque: a neurotic, weak, overly intellectual New Yorker who complains to his therapist (Paul Mazursky, aptly) that he's paralyzed by his feeling of existential insignificance.

Also, he has six legs.

He's Z-4195 (Z for short), one of millions of worker ants in a colony beneath Central Park (indicated, in the film's witty opening shot, by a silhouetted Manhattan skyline whose skyscrapers turn out to be blades of grass seen from an ant's-eye view). The casting of Allen and other unlikely stars as the voices in Antz is the first and foremost asset of this immensely entertaining computer-animated feature's bountiful cleverness, invention, and surprising satirical depth.

The colony in Antz is a totalitarian state where individual will takes a back seat to the good of the community. Social roles (worker, soldier, or royalty) are determined at birth, and a relentless work ethic is fostered by signs everywhere bearing Orwellian slogans ("Conquer Idleness," "Freetime Is for Training"). Worker Z is a tunnel digger (he prefers to call himself a "soil relocation engineer"), as minor and expendable as the spermatozoon he played in Everything You Ever Wanted To Know About Sex. Z's problem, according to his sassy co-worker Azteca (Jennifer Lopez), is, "You think too much."

Z is not the only dissatisfied individualist in the colony. Despite her lofty status, Princess Bala (Sharon Stone) does not relish the prospect of an arranged marriage to the power-mad General Mandible (Gene Hackman) or a future as Queen, which means a lifetime spent giving birth every two seconds. One night, the restless princess goes slumming in an after-work bar, where Z dances with her and falls in love. Since his station prevents him from ever seeing her again, he convinces his best friend, a burly soldier named Weaver (Sylvester Stallone), to swap places with him so that Z can march in a military review and catch Bala's eye. Weaver discovers that he enjoys digging, especially alongside Azteca; meanwhile Z and the troops are ordered on a suicide mission to attack a band of termites. It's only the beginning of a series of adventures for Z, who later finds himself battling bigger bugs, exploring the dangerous outside world, searching for the fabled Insectopia ("where the streets are paved with food"), wooing the snooty Bala, battling to save the colony from Mandible's horrific scheme, and unwittingly sparking a revolution by proving that caste isn't destiny. As Z sums it up later, Antz is your basic "boy meets girl, boy likes girl, boy changes underlying social order" story.

The tale's arc is that of a classic Disney cartoon like Beauty and the Beast or Aladdin -- no surprise, since Jeffrey Katzenberg, who supervised those films and micromanaged their story development, is now a principal at DreamWorks. Antz is a coup for him, not just because it beats Disney's computer-animated A Bug's Life into theaters by a few weeks, but also because it is only the second computer-animated feature ever, after 1995's Toy Story. Novelty value alone should make it a huge hit. The animation, done by graphics firm PDI, represents some major technical advances that are apparent in the ants' extremely expressive faces and the sense of independent movements among a cast of thousands of insect extras. Both the ant colony and the surface world are fully realized universes that look, if not real, then fantastically imaginative and sleekly stylized.

But the film's primary asset is its cast. Allen is certainly more lovable here than he has been in any of his own films for years, and he has delicious chemistry with the unlikely Stone and Stallone. Hackman and sidekick Christopher Walken are suitably creepy. Also fine in cameos are Danny Glover as the wise veteran who bonds with Z on the battlefield in a scary, six-legged Private Ryan sequence, and Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin as noblesse-oblige- minded, truly WASPy wasps. It's this ensemble, even more than the state-of- the-art animation or the subtle satire, that makes Antz a moviegoers' picnic.