Antz

Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson’s 1998 animation follows Z, an ant sorted into the worker caste at birth. After meeting Princess Bala he swaps places with the soldier Weaver and finds that General Mandible means to drown the queen and the workers and start the colony over. The comedy is carried by talk. Woody Allen reworked his lines to his own rhythm, and Eric Darnell has described how Allen turned plain exposition on the page into windows onto the character. Raman Hui’s first drawing was a caricature of Woody Allen with antennae, and he made more than three thousand drawings in a year. This was the first feature by Pacific Data Images, a studio that had lived until then on commercials and television graphics. It built a facial system simulating the muscles of a face, and the Academy gave Dick Walsh a Technical Achievement Award in 2003 for the PDI/DreamWorks Facial Animation System. The crowd system could carry sixty thousand ants in one shot. Antz opened on 2 October 1998, A Bug’s Life on 25 November. A good fit if you want the division of labour laid out as a rule in the opening minutes and most of the jokes in one voice’s cadence. Not for a seven year old: nobody in Z’s platoon survives the termite battle but Z.