The Travolta/Cage Project #81 The Ant Bully (2006)
The Travolta/Cage Project is an ambitious, years-long multi-media exploration of the fascinating, overlapping legacies of Face/Off stars John Travolta and Nicolas Cage with two components: this online column exploring the actor’s complete filmographies in chronological order and the Travolta/Cage podcast, where Clint Worthington, myself and a series of fascinating guests discuss the movies I write about here.
Read previous entries in the column here, listen to the podcast here, pledge to the Travolta/Cage Patreon at this blessed web address and finally follow us on Twitter at https://twitter.com/travoltacage
Robert Zemeckis earned back to back lifetime passes with Back to the Future and Who Framed Roger Rabbit but he will have to answer on his judgment day for the dead-eyed abomination that is Polar Express.
Polar Express unleashed a whole plague of unwatchable CGI atrocities from both the bowels of hell and the farthest reaches of the Uncanny Valley. I’ve had the misfortune to cover some of the more unfortunate progeny of The Polar Express in Luc Besson’s damn near unwatchable Arthur and the Invisibles and the legendarily unsuccessful Mars Needs Mom.
2006’s The Ant Bully is another of The Polar Express’ hell-spawn, its demon progeny. Individually and collectively The Polar Express, Arthur and the Invisibles, The Ant Bully and Mom Needs Mars are unbeatable arguments for the warmth and craftsmanship of conventional animation rather than the dead-eyed soullessness of CGI at its mid-aughts worst.
There’s something uniquely unnerving about bad CGI movies from this period, whether it’s the oppressively ugly character design or the wonky animation.
The Tom Hanks-produced 2006 kid flick The Ant Bully is about Lucas Nickle, a pint-sized 10 year old Poindexter who is bullied relentlessly both by peers so nightmarishly designed they inspired Rapsittie Street Kids: Believe in Santa flashbacks and Stan Beals, an exterminator voiced by Paul Giamatti.
Beals is roughly five thousand times more intense and disturbing than is at all appropriate for a children’s film like this. He’s supposed to be a sadist, a bad guy and a creep. Instead he comes off like a probable serial killer, cannibal and child murderer.
Stan is also wildly inappropriate in his interactions with children. When Lucas tells the foul-smelling sociopath with the thousand yard stare that he doesn’t think he should sign a contract hiring the exterminator (possibly because such a document would not be legal in any sense) the much older man explodes with rage and starts peppering the SMALL CHILD with crude schoolyard taunts.
Sounding more demented and enraged with each word, the evil exterminator hisses, “You don’t think you should, huh? You don’t think? So who does your thinking for you? Your mommy? (breaks into insulting approximation of a whiny child) Mommy, mommy, mommy! What do I do? I’m just a little baby that can’t think for himself! Please wipe my little bottom for me! Wipe me! Oh, please, please wipe me! Wa-wa-wa-wa!”
For emphasis, the evil exterminator very ostentatiously pretends to wipe his rear end with the contract. The bug-hating mass murderer of the insect world’s vicious mockery succeeds in getting Lucas to sign the contract.
This spells bad news for a utopian ant colony ruled by Meryl Streep’s Queen Ant that includes shouty wizard Zoc (Nicolas Cage). That’s right: The Ant Bully reunites the stars of Spike Jonze’s Adaptation for an infinitely lesser and much more straightforward literary adaptation.
To stave off an apocalypse, Zoc uses a magical potion to shrink Lucas, whose ant-slaughtering ways have earned him the nickname “The Destroyer” among the ants, down to ant size.
Ah, but it’s not enough merely to stave off an apocalypse by manner of shrinking. Since The Ant Bully is a children’s movie based on a children’s book it is also absolutely essential to impart life lessons.
What kind of life lessons? Lucas’ redemptive arc calls for him to stop acting like a human being—vicious, self-centered, devoid of empathy or understanding—and embrace his inner ant.
How do ants behave? In The Ant Bully they have a utopian society that runs more or less on the principles laid down by Karl Marx and Frederic Engles in their seminal 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto.
The Ant Bully is all about rejecting individualism and feverish competition in favor of collectivism. The importance of setting aside selfish desires and ugly self-interest and being a team player is a staple of children’s entertainment but The Ant Bully very overtly, explicitly embraces that dynamic on a societal level as well as an individual one.
What makes The Ant Bully curious pinko agitprop is that it does not seem to realize that it’s commie propaganda at all. Instead it has deluded itself into believing that it is a typical kid’s film with the requisite heavy-handed message about thinking about others and not just yourself.
The now ant-sized Lucas is championed by Hova, a nurse ant and proponent of human beings as a species voiced by Julia Roberts. Yes, Julia Roberts. Thanks perhaps to Hanks’ well-earned reputation as the most beloved man in Hollywood The Ant Bully has a ridiculously stacked, mostly wasted voice cast.
It’s the kind of movie that has a “zany” comic relief grandmother character whose defining characteristics are that she’s “comically” mentally ill, believes in space aliens and her dentures are perpetually tumbling out of her mouth. For this thankless/embarrassing role the filmmakers snagged living legend and national treasure Lily Tomlin.
I similarly got VERY excited when I saw that the always hilarious Larry Miller voices Lucas’ dad. That excitement dissipated when I discovered that the role of the dad here is to leave in the first ten minutes and return at the very end.
The Ant Bully illustrates the strengths as well as the limitations of celebrity voice casting. What little appeal the film possesses is attributable to the cult actors in its cast, and I’m not talking about Alison Mack, who voices Lucas’ older sister and is a cult actor in an unusual way in the sense that she very famously helped run a prominent sex cult.
I’m referring instead to Cage, who brings his A-game to a role and a movie unworthy of him. Cage’s kooky insect wizard is a hurricane of kooky energy and free-floating eccentricity. He’s not alone. Fellow cult god Bruce Campbell voices a macho ant and you better believe that when they hired Cage, Campbell, Giamatti and Ricardo Montalban, in his final performance as a velvet-voiced ant bigwig to do their trademark shtick they delivered big time in a way this underwhelming misfire most assuredly did not.
When I first looked up The Bully it looked wholly unremarkable except for the casting of Nicolas Cage as an ant wizard and a crazily overqualified voice cast made up of some of our greatest and most successful actors and actresses.
I was right. For a Marxist children’s movie with a John Wayne Gacy-like figure of pure evil as its villain The Ant Bully is shockingly forgettable and bland but Cage invests this unpleasant mediocrity with all manner of crackpot personality, as do Campbell, Montalban and Giamatti.
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