Ant Bully - Una vita da formica

Sometimes animated movies can surprise you. And this was one of those movies. While it did not wow me, it did have a nice storyline and good voicing talent and that was good enough.

Cage and Roberts play two ants. The thought of those two as ants at first seemed funny. But since they made them human, everything turned out alright. Enter actual conflict with other insects and it makes for a descent film.

The concept, however, has been used before. Animals/insects/aliens being threatened by humans is all too familiar. But it gets over such a thing with making it similar to Western English Europeans dealing Native American Indians to a small extent and that familiarize the audience with the conflict between ant and boy.

Overall, not bad. "B-"

I love CG and am not tired of it yet. To me, the medium of the story is not as important as the quality of the plot, and in The Ant Bully, the story was just too overdone to be satisfying. The graphics and sounds were nice, and it's a shame they were not paired with a more unique storyline.

Pros: The voices were expressive, and there's a different take on ants in this movie than in the previous ones. These follow the laws of nature in some respects but don't in others, so their world may not be as familiar or believable to viewers as those in A Bug's Life or Antz might have been. The CG is great, with nice details where they're needed, and there are different species of wildlife involved. Now if they could just move on to a new subject. No one's done a big CG movie about cockroaches yet...

Cons: The message of the movie is pushed a bit too hard. In many ways, it's exactly the same message as the one in the previous two ant movies. Ant Bully might be pretty interesting for anyone who hasn't already seen A Bug's Life and Antz, but you'll probably still yawn a little and say the magician ant's catch-phrase along with him when it's repeated for the third time.

Elements from several recent computer-generated pictures are truly evident in this animated feature that focuses on a young boy who takes his frustrations out on defenseless ants after being bullied himself by his peers. After he magically gets turned to the size of an ant, the youngster learns how the other half lives and survives. Under-rated picture that has good messages for the kiddies and will keep them occupied on rainy afternoons. A bit slow-moving and old hat for hardened adults, but still more upside nonetheless. Julia Roberts and Nicolas Cage are the two biggest names in a strong cast that lends their voices to their cartoonish alter egos. 4 stars out of 5.

I don't understand why some of the better animated films have semi-low ratings, I think because people were comparing this movie to the film "Antz", I'm not quite sure if it was a sequel, but I thought on it's own "The Ant Bully" was a very fun movie for all ages. The animation and the story were fun and great to watch, I honestly think that The Ant Bully is one of the best animated films I have seen in a while.

Lucas is a boy who is constantly picked on and he ends up taking his anger out on the ants in his front yard by smashing their colony and drowning them with the hose. The ants are fed up and decide to shrink Lucas and give him a taste of what they go through when he drowns and destroys their city. He now has to work as an ant and become one of them, he slowly realizes how important the ants are and how wrong he was. But things get more difficult when he forgets that he hired an exterminator to get rid of the ants.

The Ant Bully was a very touching and wonderful story that I felt is important for kids to watch. I loved how it showed the moral of "What goes around comes around", kids need to learn that more now a days, because it's very true. Not to mention that The Ant Bully in general is just a great animated film that the whole family could get a kick out of. A great cast and a fun filled story made this film work, so don't be so harsh.

7/10

"Ant Bully" was an OK movie about a boy named Lucas (vocied by Zach Tyler Eisen) who was shrunk to ant size. He was shrunken by a wizard ant named Zoc (Nicolas Cage) as a punishment for Lucas harming the ant colony. The Queen (Meryl Streep) then instructed her colony to train Lucas to become an ant like themselves which was a better solution than eating him.

This movie simply whelmed me (to use a term I heard from a YouTube comedy skit.) I wasn't overwhelmed, nor was I underwhelmed. The animation quality was fair-to-middling as was the plot. "Avatar" would go on to have a similar theme (converting a person into one of them) and I didn't like that movie at all. "Ant Bully" has similar components as other more successful movies, but the different elements didn't come together in that harmonious way that gives you a spectacular movie.