Category: Cartoons & Animation - Children - Children's Video - Family - Feature Film Family
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DVD The Ant Bully (Full Screen Edition)
An all-star cast--including such A-list stars as Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage, and Meryl Streep--lend their voices to The Ant Bully. Social misfit Lucas gets bullied by the bigger boys in his neighborhood, so he takes out his frustrations on the only things around smaller than him: An ant hill on his front lawn. After being flooded and stepped on, the ants fight back when ant wizard Zoc (Cage, National Treasure) develops a potion that shrinks Lucas down to bug-size. But Zoc's thirst for revenge gets foiled when the beatific ant queen (Streep, The Devil Wears Prada) decrees that Lucas must learn to live like an ant, and Zoc's girlfriend Hova (Roberts, Runaway Bride) takes up the task of teaching the unhappy boy how to value others over himself. The animation of The Ant Bully makes good use of scale as Lucas grapples with the gigantic world around him, but the writing is not so imaginative; the name actors are thrown away on bland characters and lackluster dialogue. The lessons Lucas learns are admirable (and amusingly Communist in flavor), but the way he learns them feels contrived and uncompelling. It's too bad, because there probably won't be many other movies featuring the combined talents of Meryl Streep and Bruce Campbell (Army of Darkness). Also featuring Ricardo Montalban (Star Trek: The Wrath of Khan), Lily Tomlin (Nashville), and Paul Giamatti (Sideways) as a sleazy exterminator. --Bret Fetzer
Review(s): DVD The Ant Bully (Full Screen Edition)
Good clean fun for kids
Ant Bully is an animated adventure about a boy who bullies an ant hill, but has the tables turned on him when the ants shrink him down to their size. Rather than eating him, the ants decide to teach him a lesson by forcing him to live the way an ant does for a few days.
During this shrunken period, the main character is forced to dodge deadly wasps and bullfrogs. He finds the ants greatest adversary to be the very exterminator he hired to fumigate them, as he begins to poison the ant hill with a cloud of nauxious gas.
While resembling "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids!" quite a bit, Ant Bully puts a new twist on the whole "shrinking" thing, and I found it much more entertaining than any of the "Shrunk" movies. If your children enjoy animated movies of any sort, Ant Bully would be a great addition to their collection. Buy it today, you won't be sorry.
Kids movie? No, it's just communism animated.
This movie is laced with communistic philosophies and ideas. I'm surely not a conspiracy theorist, as many, many others have found this to be so. Just go search online and you'll be surprised.
It's amazing what kind of filth they'll put in kids' movies these years.
SUBTLE magic goes a LONG way
I was gonna give ANT BULLY 4 stars, because I'm pretty stingy with 5 stars, but the more I thought about it, the more I thought... no, it deserves 5 stars.
In this horrible and weak creative market that Hollywood has become, it's common place to forget movies these days, moments after watching them. You got the so, so's and the seen it a hundred times, the capitalizing off trend movies, the talentless talk of the town startlet movies, the kids want fart jokes movies and the hey, I'm independent and I'm cool movies and then there's movies like the ANT BULLY.
It's been two or three weeks now and I still think about THE ANT BULLY. It wasn't perfect. The animation doesn't quite reach the quality of PIXAR, but this movie was the perfect combination of childlike humor and adult coolness. Not to mention, it taps into that childlike innocence that we all can relate to.
You can relate to the bored kid destroying the ant hill in his yard. You laugh at the subtle humor as the ants cry with KATRINA DISASTER desperation as they ponder the fact that it'll take them a WHOLE DAY to rebuild everything. You smile as the Ants CRAVE and cherish the colored rocks (jellybeans) like they're the holy grail.
Yet, it's the effectiveness of the camera shots and the humor that grabbed me. Particularly the shots of the dramatic scene unfolding as Lucas lights the firecracker in an attempt to blow up the attacking wasps... a huge explosion is coming... and it cuts to a wide shot of the yard... and a distant, faint pop and a small cloud of smoke. Also, the whole entire avoid the frog and escape from the frogs scenario was awesome. The wasps were cool too... almost... StarWarsish?
Although I think it's the whole ANT BULLY package that had me feeling like a kid again, and for the first time in a long time, there was a movie that I remembered and thought about weeks later.
When the farmer's back is turned, the animals party down in Barnyard. A young cow named Otis (voiced by Kevin James, The King of Queens) loves to have fun at the farm's wild late-night hoe-downs, despite the disapproval of his father, Ben (Sam Elliott, Thank You for Smoking). When Ben dies defending the barnyard from marauding coyotes, Otis is chosen as the new leader--but responsibility sits uneasily on Otis' head and he fears he may not be able to protect his friends from the coyotes. Barnyard's design of the cows seems inspired by Gary Larson's The Far Side comics; though the style is simple, the characters are surprisingly expressive. From moment to moment, the movie is reasonably entertaining. The actors--including Courteney Cox, Danny Glover, and... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 12 December 2006 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The love life of a woolly mammoth--handled with G-rated delicacy--drives this sequel to the first computer-animated romp in the age of prehistoric mammals. While the first Ice Age took a delightful premise and suffocated it with a formulaic plot--in which a mammoth named Manfred (voiced by Ray Romano, Everyone Loves Raymond), a sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo, Moulin Rouge!), and a sabre-tooth tiger named Diego (Denis Leary, Rescue Me) helped an abandoned human infant return to its tribe (basically, Three Mammals and a Baby)--the sequel takes the now-familiar setting, gives it a shapeless, episodic storyline, and yet somehow becomes pretty... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 21 November 2006 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The manicured lawns and overstuffed garbage cans of suburbia become a buffet for woodland creatures in Over the Hedge. A self-centered raccoon named RJ (voiced by Bruce Willis, Die Hard) steals and accidentally destroys the hoard of an angry bear (Nick Nolte, 48 Hours), who gives the raccoon a week to replace it. RJ despairs--until he meets an odd gang of foragers, ranging from a turtle named Verne (Garry Shandling, The Larry Sanders Show), a father/daughter duo of opossums (the bizarre pairing of William Shatner and pop singer Avril Lavigne), a family of porcupines (with A Mighty Wind's Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara as the parents), and a hyperactive squirrel named Hammy (Steve Carell, The 40 Year Old Virgin). By convincing these friendly... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Tim Johnson - Karey Kirkpatrick DVD Release Date: Released the 17 October 2006 Usually ships in 24 hours
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There's an extra coat of hot wax on Pixar's vibrant, NASCAR-influenced comedy about a world populated entirely by cars. Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) is the slick rookie taking the Piston Cup series by storm when the last race of the season (the film's high-octane opening) ends in a three-way tie. On the way to the tie-breaker race in California, Lightning loses his way off Route 66 in the Southwest desert and is taught to stop and smell the roses by the forgotten citizens of Radiator Springs. It's odd to have such a slim story from the whizzes of Pixar, and the film pales a bit from their other films (though can that be a fair comparison?). Nonetheless, Cars is another gleaming ride with Pixar founder John Lasseter, who's directing for the first time since Toy Story... More Info about this DVD DVD Release Date: Released the 07 November 2006 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The spooky shadows and eerie creaking of a rickety old house are brought to life via lush CGI in Monster House. A young boy named DJ has suspicions about the house across the street and the cranky old man (voiced by Steve Buscemi, Fargo) who lives there. When the old man has a heart attack and is carried away by an ambulance, DJ thinks the danger is over. Unfortunately, as he, his friend Chowder, and a candy-selling prep-school girl named Jenny discover, the house itself has plans--plans that include eating all the kids who'll be trick-or-treating that Halloween night. Monster House begins with some deliciously creepy scenes that will send chills down children's spines (and may be too intense for younger viewers); animated movies rarely make such effective use of what... More Info about this DVD Director(s): Gil Kenan DVD Release Date: Released the 24 October 2006 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The love life of a woolly mammoth--handled with G-rated delicacy--drives this sequel to the first computer-animated romp in the age of prehistoric mammals. While the first Ice Age took a delightful premise and suffocated it with a formulaic plot--in which a mammoth named Manfred (voiced by Ray Romano, Everyone Loves Raymond), a sloth named Sid (John Leguizamo, Moulin Rouge!), and a sabre-tooth tiger named Diego (Denis Leary, Rescue Me) helped an abandoned human infant return to its tribe (basically, Three Mammals and a Baby)--the sequel takes the now-familiar setting, gives it a shapeless, episodic storyline, and yet somehow becomes pretty...