Antz [Signature Collection]

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"I think everything must go back to the fact that I had a very anxious childhood. You know, my mother never had time for me. When you´re the middle child in a family of five million, you don´t get any attention."

Those are the musings of Woody Allen as Z, Ant Z, an ant among ants, a neurotic ant who longs for something more than conformity in a totalitarian state, who yearns to be an individual in the computer-animated adventure, "Antz." It´s a visually stunning film, embracing varied and sympathetic characters and a surprisingly coherent story.

Although it is hard to tell just what age its target audience might be, (it´s too sophisticated in thought and language for younger children), it should satisfy most imaginative adolescents and beyond. The movie is filled with enough sights and sounds to keep viewers engrossed the first time around and probably bring them back again. The quality of its DVD reproduction ensures that most of the filmmakers´ art is properly brought to the TV screen.

It´s Allen´s movie, to be sure. Indeed, it is principally an animated Woody Allen comedy, with Allen as always playing the poor schlemiel, the born loser who, nevertheless, rises to the occasion when trouble is at hand. Certainly, trouble is at hand. At six hands. Z is a lowly worker ant who falls in love with the beautiful Princess Bala (voiced by Sharon Stone), but, of course, he is far beneath her station. Attempting to attract her attention, he trades places with a friend who´s a soldier ant (Sylvester Stallone) and is summarily sent off to war. Not his idea of a good time, but he inadvertently comes back a hero, the lone survivor of a disastrous battle with neighboring termites. The driving force behind the scrimmage is the nefarious General Mandible (Gene Hackman), a megalomaniacal schemer intent on taking over the colony from the Princess´s mother, the Queen (Anne Bancroft).

As things proceed, Z manages clumsily to kidnap the Princess and before long they find themselves outdoors and looking for the mystical land of Insectopia. But inside the colony, the General, with the help of his trusty lieutenant, Cutter (Christopher Walken), is about to have his way. The plot continues along these lines, and only Z can save the day. In the course of events, we meet Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtin as a pair of snobby wasps, Danny Glover as a dedicated career soldier, Jennifer Lopez as a career worker, and Paul Mazursky as Z´s psychologist. The filmmakers know their limits and wrap things up at about an hour and twenty minutes.

The most striking feature of "Antz" is the animation. The computer-generated graphics are nothing short of amazing. It won´t be long before live actors will be looking for a new livelihood given the precision of the computer artwork. Every creature, every object, every setting is rendered in three textural dimensions. Even if the plot doesn´t interest you, the visual element alone should keep your attention. The only minor drawback is that ants all look pretty much alike, and try as the filmmakers might, only so much personality can be fitted to any one ant´s face. Fortunately, before the film gets too tiresome from sameness, Z and the Princess are out of the nest and into the outer world where they meet a variety of fascinating new bugs, chief among them the aforementioned wasps.

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