A cartoon boy sees things from a new perspective after
being shrunk to insectoid proportions, but as far as originality, you’ve seen
it before.
It
took me half an hour to get over the ick factor watching this movie full
of screen-filling, if animated, insects. Angular, shiny, and purplish, they’re
almost realistic, to the extent that that’s a good thing. Seems like it was
only a few years ago (1998, actually) that both A Bug’s Life and Antz
appeared. Where Antz was a Marxist allegory, this version of a kid book
merely aspires to being a cartoon version of an After School Special. A
preschool special, more accurately. A boy gets bullied, then “bullies” some
insects by spraying their anthill with a hose. How was he to know that these
were brainy, English-speaking ants whose voices are those of Julia Roberts,
Nicholas Cage, and even Meryl Streep? By shrinking him to their size, they
teach him a Valuable Lesson. He uses his knowledge of humans to help them
combat their insect enemies as well as the mighty exterminator (Paul Giamatti.)
The ants have built a whole god-devil mythology. We never learn much about the
god part, but the exterminator is the devil. (He works for Beals-a-Bug pest
control, which is about as funny as it gets.) The boy also learns that
thinking positively will help you accomplish things. True to a point, but, to
paraphrase Dusty Springfield, wishin’ and hopin’ and thinkin’ and prayin’ won’t
get you suction cups on your arms to help walk up walls or provide you the
skills to persuade your fellow nerds to unite against the local thug. But it’s
nice to think so, and so this is a nice movie to park the tots in front of and
admire the amazing CGI footage.
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