Having coaxed Robin Williams into a game-changing vocal turn as Aladdin’s Genie while he was at Disney, Katzenberg was after movie stars to provide the voices of characters from the very beginning. On this film more than almost any other subsequent DreamWorks project, that’s a result of casting. While A Bug’s Life is a Pixar movie, Antz is doing its utmost to be a Woody Allen movie. Still, despite all the noise about the similarities between the two projects, there’s a clear divergence in tone in the resulting films. Pixar’s film isn’t up there with their best, but it is better for having taken its sweet time. That film never materialized, but the same basic story was played out in the battle between Antz and A Bug’s Life. How do the films measure up?įunnily enough, DreamWorks was working a film based on The Tortoise And The Hare around this time, as part of their development deal with Aardman. This plan worked, and Antz arrived on screens a month before A Bug’s Life, costing $15 million more to make. It’s reported that he personally offered PDI’s animators cash incentives to get the film finished on time, in a mad rush to get it out in cinemas ahead of the Pixar movie. In retaliation, Katzenberg unexpectedly moved the release of Antzforward five months, to October 1998. Sometime after this date was announced, Disney positioned Pixar’s second outing, now known as A Bug’s Life, to come out on the same weekend, in a clear bid to flatten the biblical epic. Slated for release in 1998, Brenda Chapman’s The Prince Of Egypt was supposed to be DreamWorks Animation’s first release, with Antz to follow in March 1999. The feud raged on throughout the production process on both films as the Disney higher-ups began sabre rattling in return. He felt Pixar’s film was being treated as “cannon fodder” in a fight that wasn’t of their making.įurther reading: 25 Underrated Family Movies
Furious, he personally called Katzenberg to question him directly.
Naturally, Lasseter was dismayed that DreamWorks announced Antz as their first CG-animated film in the Hollywood trade papers. According to Katzenberg, one such pitch was for a film called Army Ants, which was the story of a pacifist ant in a militarized colony. Many of these ideas went on to generate the Disney renaissance of the 1990s, with films such as The Little Mermaid, Beauty & The Beast, and Aladdin, as well as inspiring later entries like Pocahontas and Hercules. Back in the late 1980s, when the latter was shaking up Disney’s animation division, he held a kind of gong show where everyone at the company, from the animators to the janitors, would have an opportunity to pitch feature projects for their boss. Whichever filmmaker you side with, Lasseter and Katzenberg both say the idea started at Disney. That said, it’s fascinating to compare and contrast the two films as works by relatively new studios – one very deliberately striking out against Disney’s monopoly over animated features, and the other working under the roof of the House of Mouse – in the context of this grudge match, as well as on their own merits. But story-wise, the inspiration behind the film gets a little muddier.
In practical terms, bugs were the next characters to tackle in CGI for the same reason as toys had been the first step – they were characters with hard exteriors that could be created in a lifelike fashion by the revolutionary, but still nascent new animation style. In the run-up to release, the public feud between Katzenberg and Disney was one of the industry stories of the year. Both films have worker ants as heroes, saving their colony and falling for a princess in the process. Remarkably, DreamWorks’ Antz and Pixar’s A Bug’s Life were released within six weeks of each other in 1998. But when former Disney head honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg’s DreamWorks Animation emerged a few years later, it seemed that the second and third CG-animated films were going to be very similar indeed. At the time, nobody had seen anything like it before. Back in 1995, Disney released Pixar’s Toy Story, the first feature-length computer-generated film, and changed animation in Hollywood forever.