Woody Allen is the voice of Z-4195, the feature ant. There are millions upon millions of ants in his colony, and they're either workers, soldiers, or royalty. Z is a worker, and he just doesn't feel like he's cut out for working. When he meets Princess Bala (voiced by Sharon Stone) when she goes slumming at the worker bar, Z suddenly feels a reason to live. So in order to meet her, he changes places with his soldier friend Weaver (Sylvester Stallone) and inadvertantly gets sent off to war against the termites. Soon he and Bala are on a chase to find Insectopia and they meet all sorts of interesting characters.

So what's the problem you ask? First of all, this movie is centered around the mass murder of ants. The General (Gene Hackman) wants to start his own colony of ants, by keeping only the top of the line ants, and killing off the rest. So he first figures he can kill some off by sending some off to war against the termites. There is this huge battle, and at the end, only Z survives. But he walks through this massive scene of death, and one little girl in the audience kept asking her father, "what happened daddy, what happened?" Is this something kids should be seeing, even in a cartoon state? It wasn't as if the battle scenes were trying to be humourous, there were ants being melted by poison, and arms and legs being torn off. In a movie obviously trying to go after the kid dollars, you'd think they would have toned down the violence a bit.

Also, I didn't like the animation of the ants faces. They were too hard edged and looked almost too human. They just weren't appealing as characters. Woody Allen did his whole whiny schtick as he does in all his movies, but this time out of the face of an ant, which to me made it less appealing that nnormal. The story just plodded along, and I felt bored throughout most of the film. To me, the movie picked up when Z and Bala met the Wasps. Now those were well made characters. And when Bala and Z made it to Insectopia, and ran into the other bugs, that was fun too. But overall, the movie wasn't entertaining to me. It was visually incredible (except for those darn ant faces), but I didn't feel like the story lived up to the visuals.

So overall, I wouldn't take the kids there, thinking that it's a Disney-esque love affair with ants. The movie is rated PG if that's any indication of what it's like. Antz is geared more towards adults, but even so, I didn't find it all that entertaining. I guess I'll get emails from people yelling at me again, but that's just how I feel. I'm looking forward to A Bug's Life coming out in a few weeks. So shoot me.