Keith Lango on The Ant Bully
animator explains why movie flopped at the box office
In his blog, The Ant Bully character animator calls the film "a big stinking pile of average corporate mush."
(Source: keithlango.com)
"(Warner Bros.' The Ant Bully) had so many earmarks of what should have made it a successful film," writes animator Keith Lango in his blog. "And in the end, that's why I think it is a failure. It's just a wee bit too calculated to succeed."
The animated family film has had no shortage of detractors since it only made $8,432,465 in its opening weekend. From the critics who panned it as a Marxist manifesto for kiddies, to the fact that it got sandwiched between Monster House and Barnyard. The scenario of 3 movies in the same genre, opening in 3 weeks, meant someone was going to suffer and The Ant Bully was it.
Lango, a character animator on the film, offers his own interpretation of why it flopped.
It wasn't because The Ant Bully was badly made, or sabotaged by the studio, he writes. Lango points out that producers put over $60 million into the film, most of which actually showed onscreen. It featured experienced director John A. Davis (Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) and the voice talents of Julia Roberts, Paul Giamatti, Meryl Streep, and Nicolas Cage.
Lango also praises the animation, saying there were "scenes that are just gobstoppingly fabulous to look at - some real fantastic demo reel pieces in there." He also says that when DNA Productions laid off its animators after finishing The Ant Bully, headhunters from Pixar, Sony, ILM, Dreamworks, PDI, Blue Sky, Digital Domain and Laika snapped them all up.
In conclusion, The Ant Bully had a great director, a generous budget, loads of star power and gorgeous animation. So what went wrong? For Lango the problem was right at the start.
"There are two kinds of animated movies," he writes. "Both can end up like a pile of poo, but in my opinion only one can end up being something audiences get excited about."
The first is when a "person (or two, no more) has a burning story idea in his mind and heart...Often these poor sods are chewed up by the Hollywood system and their movies are turned into derivative piles of crap, but somewhere way, way back in the beginning there was something fun going on...Great examples of this kind of movie that survived the creation process...would be The Iron Giant, The Incredibles and Toy Story."
The second kind of animated feature film is "the cynical corporate creations...assembled at the behest of a variety of business minds...The core driving principle is their market value and potential profit returns...I believe that no matter how slick or well done, that lack of a soul shows up on screen."
Lango firmly places The Ant Bully in this latter category. "My friends who worked with me...aren't gonna like what I have to say here - but I've always felt that we were making a big stinking pile of average corporate mush...We worked hard, we did our best to bring passion and life to it, we put a lot into it, there's a TON of talent on screen and folks have a right to be proud of their work- but in the end, in the cruel indifferent world of the marketplace it's just kinda bleh.
"The original screenplay had some heart," he continues, "but the rewrites traded heart for slap-dash fart jokes. Crude humor is always the ready friend of execs looking to 'punch up' a film for test viewing scores, and the rewrites for (The Ant Bully) were pretty heavy toward the end of production. In its primary form it wasn't the funniest movie and the market demands that animated films be funny. So out goes the character motivations and some more serious ideas, in come the cynical sarcastic asides. And since everybody in charge was a hired hand nobody had a really strong personal investment to fight that.
"By the spreadsheet and by the focus group feedback scores in test screenings The Ant Bully should have been a success...Yet in the end this is the ultimate corporate movie. It's a product devised according to formulas and ingredients, preened and pruned from the very beginning to be a pop-culture product in the mass market to force feed the kiddo's another round of pixels in exchange for their parent's disposable income. And despite the valiant efforts of the artists and technicians hired to make this thing look good, people aren't usually going to get excited about such things."
Movies have always had a running war between art and commerce. Many of Pixar's "burning story ideas" (like Cars or The Incredibles) come with a $90 million + price tag. With that kind of money involved, it's not surprising that investors want to hedge their bets, to make sure their investment is a sure thing. And this is where the art/commerce axis can break down. If a filmmaker fails to convince to studio heads, focus groups and investors of the genius of his vision, he can suddenly find it reduced to "a derivative pile of crap." And if those same focus groups and studios create the idea in the first place, then there's no one with the passion and drive to save it from becoming "a big stinking pile of average corporate mush."
Not for nothing did famed writer Harlan Ellison describe writing for Hollywood as "proving your talent to people who have none."
Click here to see Lango's blog in its entirety.
