The Ant Bully

Wow. Sometimes you just gotta love the kind of subtext they’re sliding by in children’s films these days. Here we’ve got some seriously heavy-duty anti-war imagery going down, coupled with a message that could have been cribbed straight from the notes of a student in Marxism. But hey, we’re talking a movie about a colony of Red Ants, so I guess that goes to figure, doesn’t it? Li’l Lucas is stone-cold hating life. The Man is getting him down (actually, the neighborhood bully and his posse), so he in turn vents his frustrations on an anthill within terror range. Aside from not actually showing him tearing the wings off of butterflies, the kid is a nascent serial killer. Fortunately, the ants devise a potion to shrink him down to their size so that they can break him of his capitalist running dog ways and recognize the value of the collective. A well done kid’s film that’ll have the red state haters gnashing their clothes and rending their teeth, and sometimes that’s entertainment enough. Plus, it features the voice of Bruce Campbell and the ant sound FX from the sci-fi classic Them! Yay!