听 Critics who raved about CG toons like Antz and A Bug's Life felt that the similarly themed Ant Bully was a bit "mundane" in comparison. Even with a starry line-up of voice talent including Nicolas Cage, Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep, this story of a naughty kid (Zach Tyler Eisen) literally and metaphorically brought down to size by a community of garden insects, barely caused a ripple at the box office.
From The Ground Up
In a 15-minute behind-the-scenes featurette director John A Davis talks about the roots of the project and gives an overview of the animation process. It all began with Tom Hanks, who used to read the children's storybook (written by John Nickle) to his son Truman at bedtime. He reckoned it would make a pretty good movie so he put in a call to Davis. But we don't hear from Hanks or any of the A-list cast. We only get a fleeting glimpse of Lilly Tomlin recording her dialogue for Mommo and we get a little peek at what the animators do on their downtime. It turns out they like to put on puppet shows for each other. Heartbreaking, isn't it?
Going by some of the other extras on offer, it seems the animators had rather too much time on their hands. The Ant Bully screensaver is basically a two-minute skit focussed on the comings-and-goings inside a glass ant farm. Admittedly, it does boast a pretty good punchline (we won't ruin it for you), but seven animated shorts featuring characters from the movie are a tad dull. They run at about a minute each and echo moments from the film, eg Lucas (Eisen) tormenting the ants with a magnifying glass on a sunny day and a gratuitous toy car stunt.
Trying To Up The Ante
A reel of deleted scenes adds up to around eleven-and-a-half minutes, but most of these didn't make it past the early stages of animation. Fugax (Bruce Campbell) has a Braveheart moment as he charges into battle ("For Queen and colony!"), a shrunken-down Lucas contemplates a trek through mom's shagpile carpet then later falls into a fish tank and Zoc (Cage) must face the dreaded fumigator (Paul Giamatti) on a quest to fetch nectar for a magic potion.
An Easter egg featurette is hidden between the ants on the bonus menu and catches those party hardy animators slacking off again. This time they offer us cartoon parodies of The Matrix and Harry Potter. Strangely though, there are no games or DVD-ROM activities for the real kids. If this DVD hopes to persuade children not to torture small insects, it's not leaving them many other options.
EXTRA FEATURES
The Ant Bully DVD is released on Monday 5th March 2007.
