Watch The Ant Bully For Free

Bad Acting and worse Bad Screenplay

what a terribly boring film. I'm sorry but this is absolutely not deserving of best picture and will be forgotten quickly. Entertaining and engaging cinema? No. Nothing performances with flat faces and mistaking silence for subtlety.

This is one of the best movies I’ve seen in a very long time. You have to go and see this on the big screen.

Actress is magnificent and exudes a hypnotic screen presence in this affecting drama.

We've seen this plot over and over again (see Dances with Wolves, Avatar, Ferngully, etc.) and this one does it worst than a lot of them. Similar to Ferngully, this is a cartoon movie with an overt message of acceptance of something that is helpless against us. While this is an important message, it is done very poorly.The jokes in this one all fall flat, the voice acting is poor, the animation is C-average, and the plot is boring and will make you sleepy. The director really had an opportunity to do some fun things with space and size distortion from an ant's perspective but we really don't get enough scenes regarding this. The kite-surfing was really the only fun one that comes to my mind. Besides this, the other ones don't really capture your attention. Skip this one.

Lucas is a rather nerdy boy with no friends. He's often bullied by his peers, including an overweight guy who won't stop giving him "atomic wedgies", and Lucas spends much of his time inside playing videogames. He vents his distress by destroying the huge anthill on his front lawn, and unknown to him the ants living there have abilities beyond human comprehension, using elements of the earth to finally get revenge on him. While he, his bimbo sister and conspiracy nut grandma are asleep, the ants shrink Lucas down and take him to the anthill where he has to learn to live in the colony and witness what his destruction has done. When he recalls hiring an exterminator to kill the ants, they all band together to prevent a mass murder of the whole colony.Ant Bully is pretty good as far as animation and plot originality goes, I'm honestly surprised it doesn't have a higher rating. Yeah it's got crude humor and some dorky moments, but come on, there are far worse animated programs out there, like Family Guy, now that's a disgusting program and I hate Family Guy! To appreciate what this film is getting at, which is that two wrongs don't make a right, you have to watch it with an open mind and ignore the annoying crude humor to see the true motives behind it. And oh, the pesticide clouds towards the end, that was wonderful, so much pollution, pollution is so wonderful... the soundtrack was kind of lame and unmemorable, but seeing Meryl Streep, who played the nuclear plant worker in the 1983 movie Silkwood, doing the voice of the queen ant, was pretty cool. Overall the voice acting wasn't bad, and the ending, when Lucas finally stands up to the bully, was pretty cool. Not a bad movie at all, you just have to see past the kind of dopey kid's stuff in it.

Lucas Nickle is a nerdy friendless kid bullied by the other kids. He takes out his frustration on the tiny ants. His parents go on a holiday leaving him with his older sister and grandma. Zoc (Nicolas Cage) is an ant wizard who accidentally creates a shrinking potion. Annoying exterminator Stan Beals (Paul Giamatti) tricks Lucas into signing a contract. Zoc puts a drop of the potion into Lucas' ear, and he's shrunk down to ant size. The ants take Lucas prisoner to face charges against the colony. The Queen sentences Lucas to learn the ways of the ant. Hova (Julia Roberts) volunteers to teach the braty kid.I really didn't like this brat. If you want something good, watch 'Honey, I Shrunk the Kids'. This has none of the charm nor likability. The animation is understandably cartoonish. This is strictly a little kiddie movie which is almost unwatchable for adults.

I will say I enjoyed The Ant Bully on the whole. Of course the concept has been done to death, and the story is predictable at times. The script on the whole is nice, maybe not as smart or as sassy as Antz and Bug's Life and certainly not as humorous. But this is an example of an animated film that looks very handsome with detailed backgrounds, vibrant colouring and convincing enough character movements. The soundtrack is absolutely lovely. I always look out for this element in every film I review, and I was most impressed with the soundtrack overall. The voice acting is another saving grace, Julia Roberts, Nicolas Cage and Paul Giamatti among others do a stellar job voicing engaging enough characters. The Ant Bully also has a great moral about bullying, a topic I feel most strongly about. Sometimes there is a danger of moralising in films being too preachy, but the writers somehow managed to avoid that, and that was most commendable. All in all, this is a above decent animated film, that never tries to be the best movie ever made. It tries to do something original about a over familiar concept, and while not entirely successful, it is a jolly good attempt. Remember you could have been watching Doogal. 8/10 Bethany Cox