Review of The Ant Bully (2006) by Markb. — 06 Aug 2006

It's not nearly as original as Monster House, or as consistently delightful as Over The Hedge, nor does it possess the huge cast of (literally) colorful characters that the Pixar movie featuring Larry the Cable Guy as a bucktoothed tow truck has--and its badly timed release is just the latest of many factors that have made the summer of 2006 a worse one for Warner Bros.

than for just about anybody else except Mel Gibson. But this backyard adventure about a boy who learns empathy for and develops a friendship with a colony of ants by magically shrinking down to their size, and thus more or less BECOMING one of them, has enough humor, excitement and just the right amount of genuine sweetness to please kids and parents alike.

It's been unjustly criticized as being a distant third-place also-ran to the 1998 CGI creepy-crawlies Antz and A Bug's Life, but The Ant Bully really has much more in common with such classics of miniaturization as Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, The Incredible Shrinking Man and (briefly but unforgettably) Fantastic Voyage.

There's a subtle moral--that those who are bullied are strong candidates for becoming bullies themselves--but some terrific action sequences (especially the climactic Death Star-like attack on the exterminator), appropriately juvenile gross-out jokes (including a memorable scene thatcombines boogers AND head lice in just a few pungent secondas of screen time) and semi-gratuitous juvenile near-nudity keep things moving briskly enough to keep the message appropriately subtextual rather than heavy-handed, even if this movie is ultimately as likely to prevent kids from stepping on ants as Bambi kept generations of them from eating venison.

Three brief incidental observations: 1.) Is the fact that this is a Play-Tone production part of the reason why Nicolas Cage, playing a human-hating ant who eventually softens his stance, frequently sounds so Tom Hanks-ish? 2.

) Which group of parents is more deserving of a trip to child-custody court for going on a kid-free vacation and leaving their way-underage offspring under minimal care and maximum danger, the ones here or those in Monster House? And 3.