The Ant Bully

That Warner Bros. has chosen to craft an animated film around childhood's fascination with all things small and squirmy is interesting – the project is adapted from John Nickle's children's book – but it makes for a strange time at the movies. The story is both simple and weird: Ten-year-old beanpole/bully Lucas (Eisen), who regularly takes out his feelings of victimization on the anthill in his front yard, finds himself part of that very colony when ant-wizard Zoc (Cage) shrinks him down to a more manageable size. The queen (Streep) mandates that he be trained to "become an ant," which Lucas does with commendable results and thanks in no small part to his ant "mentor" (Roberts), climaxing in an airborne third-act battle with Giamatti's stogie-chomping exterminator. The Ant Bully glows with vibrant greens and violets and moves with all the resolute forward motion of, well, an ant. Unfortunately it's also seemingly arbitrary in its meanderings and not what you'd call a picnic.