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"The Ant Bully" First Look In Theaters July 28, 2006 Over One Dozen Behind The Scenes Photos Poor 10-year-old Lucas Nickle (Zach Tyler Eisen) can’t get a break. To make matters worse, Lucas has become the number one target of neighborhood bully Steve, who never misses an opportunity to push him around. In turn, Lucas delights in destroying ant hills in his yard—venting his frustration on the defenseless mounds of dirt and their tiny inhabitants by kicking them, stomping them and squirting them with the garden hose. But, unbeknownst to Lucas, there is a whole world alive and busy just underneath his feet, and what he sees as “just a bunch of stupid ants” are actually members of a complex society, with names and relationships, responsibilities and emotions. They’re getting mighty tired of having their homes trampled by Lucas The Destroyer. And they are ready to fight back. The magic potion that Wizard Ant Zoc (Nicolas Cage) has long been working on is finally finished. One drop in Lucas’ gigantic human ear and he is instantly shrunken down to ant size and taken deep below the ant hill to stand trial. The Head of the Ant Council (Ricardo Montalban) proclaims Lucas guilty of crimes against the colony. Sentenced by the wise Ant Queen (Meryl Streep) to live among the ants and learn their ways to earn his freedom, Lucas finds himself in an incredible landscape suddenly teeming with life—and peril—that he never noticed or even imagined before, and embarks on the adventure of a lifetime. Against Zoc’s wishes, his kind-hearted girlfriend, Nurse Ant Hova (Julia Roberts), volunteers to mentor the miniaturized human boy. Hoping to teach Lucas the ways of the colony and help him find that one special talent he has to contribute, she soon has her hands full—all six of them—just keeping him away from trouble. With the help of her colony comrades, no-nonsense Forager Ant Kreela (Regina King) and garrulous Scout Ant Fugax (Bruce Campbell), Hova somehow manages to keep him out of the stomachs of greedy frogs and away from marauding wasps. Lucas’ developing ant skills are put to the test when he is called upon to help his new friends defend the colony against certain annihilation from the local exterminator—the greasy, growling Stan Beals (Paul Giamatti)—in an epic life-and-death struggle waged on the Nickles’ front lawn. In the process, he learns valuable lessons about friendship, compassion, teamwork and loyalty that will serve him for the rest of his life. He also gains the courage to stand up for himself no matter what the odds. From Academy Award-nominated filmmaker John A. Davis (Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) and producers Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman (The Polar Express), comes the family adventure The Ant Bully, combining vivid state-of-the-art computer animation with a witty and heartwarming story for children of all ages. The Ant Bully, opening in theaters nationwide July 28, 2006, will simultaneously debut in select IMAX theaters as The Ant Bully: An IMAX 3D Experience. Digitally converting the film’s original 3D modeling into IMAX 3D, and featuring proprietary IMAX DMR® (Digital Re-mastering) technology, it offers moviegoers an additional and uniquely immersive perspective on Lucas’ adventures into this wondrous new world. STARRING The Voices of: Nicolas Cage, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti, Lily Tomlin, Cheri Oteri, Alan Cumming, Regina King, Ricardo Montalban, Zach Tyler, Tyler James Williams WATCH TRAILER See the Complete 2006 Movie Release Schedule “Imagine a whole world you know nothing about yet probably step over every day. It could be a dynamic, hidden universe that exists in your own backyard,” suggests The Ant Bully writer/director John A. Davis, creator of Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and a man who admittedly gets some of his wildest creative ideas by “tapping into things that excited and entertained me as a kid.” If that world lies in the underground tunnels and secret chambers of a bustling ant colony, a person would have to be fairly tiny to get inside and take a good look around. And that’s exactly what happens to Lucas Nickle (Zack Tyler Eisen), a 10-year-old boy tormented by a bully, who has unfortunately become something of a bully himself by venting his frustration on the helpless insects living in his lawn. He thinks nothing of spraying them with water or stomping them with his sneakered feet every time the neighborhood tough kid pushes him around. Establishing the ants’ point of view, The Ant Bully shows the disastrous results of Lucas casually blasting their home with a garden hose—unleashing, at the subterranean level, “a huge flood sequence, with ants running for their lives,” says Davis. “Lucas would never suspect that he’s causing this kind of chaos and carnage just by dumping water on some ants.” But all that’s about to change. Through a magic elixir prepared by Wizard Ant Zoc (Nicolas Cage), Lucas is suddenly miniaturized, kidnapped from his bedroom and taken deep into the ant burrow to stand trial for his wanton destruction. Once below, he is absolutely amazed and more than a little nervous to discover that the ants have a vast and complex civilization with rules and responsibility, where every individual has a job to do for the greater good. Most incredible of all, he realizes for the first time in his life that these tenacious little creatures he once dismissed as “just a bunch of stupid ants” have thoughts and emotions just like him, not to mention a whole lot of attitude…and at the moment they’re all hopping mad at him, the one they call Lucas the Destroyer. “When you first see the ants from Lucas’ vantage point, they look like real ants, small and indistinct, the way we would view them from the distance of our great human height,” Davis observes. “But when we cut down to their level, we see they have individual expressive faces and we get that first inkling, as does Lucas eventually, that things are not always what they seem. That was one of the things that attracted me to the project: the idea of creating this alien realm completely out of the ordinary, which we get to peek inside.” “What human being hasn’t fantasized about being the size of an ant and living in their world,” says The Ant Bully producer Tom Hanks. “There’s something almost cozy about how they live—we’ve seen them in our toy ant farms—and the togetherness of the colony seems cheerful when you apply an anthropomorphic sense. That makes the story of Lucas’ adventures with the ants awfully attractive.”
It was Hanks who brought the popular 1999 Scholastic Press children’s book to Davis’ attention. “My son came home from kindergarten with a book he had checked out from the library, John Nickle’s The Ant Bully,” he relates. “Reading it together, we weren’t halfway through before I thought it would make a wonderful movie. John Davis’ Jimmy Neutron had just come out then, and I felt the match of his talent with Nickle’s story would be perfect.” Released in 2001, the 3D animated feature Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius was a labor of love from Davis and computer animation partner Keith Alcorn (an executive producer on The Ant Bully) from their Texas-based DNA Productions. Their feature film debut, it earned writer/director/producer Davis a Best Animated Feature Oscar nomination and fueled the Jimmy Neutron Nickelodeon series, developed concurrently by DNA. Audiences and critics were enchanted by the film’s unique visual style (which Davis dubbed “future-retro”) and the premise of a nerdy-but-cool boy genius who saves the world and zips around in spaceships of his own creation, all the while managing to keep his outrageous orange pompadour standing straight up. Like The Ant Bully, it blended a sense of fun with fair play. “Tom sent me the The Ant Bully to see if I had a take on it,” recalls Davis, who likewise found the story full of potential for the screen. “I thought, well, if I was going to make this movie, here’s how I would approach it.” He soon met with Hanks and his producing partner Gary Goetzman, co-founders of Playtone Productions, who successfully teamed with Robert Zemeckis in 2004 on the beloved holiday film The Polar Express. “It was obvious from our initial meeting that John’s enthusiasm, passion and vision for the material made him the perfect director for the project,” states Goetzman. “And because most children’s animated films today are branded by adult humor, it was refreshing to hear John’s take on creating an entertaining family film that would transport the audience to a unique world and take them on a fantastic adventure.” Together the three brainstormed ideas on how to realize the action onscreen and bring out the natural wonder, humor and peril of a suddenly minuscule boy lost in the unfathomable wilds of his own yard. Everything takes on a surreal new identity when even a discarded soda can looms as large as a 3-story building to tiny Lucas; low-flying wasps rumble like turboprop engines, and hordes of unfamiliar creatures roam the tall grass all around him. “It’s great when you’re immediately on the same page,” says Davis. “We saw the same things in it—the adventure aspect, the action, how cool it would be to have Lucas and the ants fighting giant wasps, and all the places he could go. In some ways, it’s the ultimate wish fulfillment for a kid.”
Davis and Hanks also discovered their mutual admiration for legendary visual effects master Ray Harryhausen, whose innovative achievements with stop-motion animation, model work and creature effects, starting in the 1950s, inspired a legion of future filmmakers who can still recite their favorite titles in an instant, as does Davis: Jason and the Argonauts, The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad and The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms. “This is my homage to him, in terms of visualizing the set pieces from the point of view of a shrunken human entering this world of the insects or visiting the land of the giants back inside his own house,” the director offers. “Ray Harryhausen long ago tapped the mother lode of creature sequences,” says Hanks. “John and I compared notes on how we could emulate his skeleton battle in Jason and the Argonauts with our wasp attack. I mean, why not aim for the best?” Coming from a background of stop-motion, rather than traditional animation, Davis made the transition to the digital realm easily because, he explains, “It’s instantly cinematic. You have cameras and camera rigs, dolly moves and crane shots. You have sets that you’ve built in the computer, and you actually drop lights onto them as if they’re physical sets because the software mimics reality. It offers you a 3D space and all of the same mechanics apply as with live action, so you’re able to tell the story in a very grand way, and you can provide sequences with an immersive quality that invites audiences to share the ride. I use a lot of POV cameras for scenes like the one in which Lucas is riding the wasp.”
At the same time, Davis is an animator for whom the term cartoony has never meant anything but fun and “a chance to step outside normal boundaries.” Visually, his goal for The Ant Bully was not photo-realism but a more stylized and imaginative environment, where, he notes, “The designs are definitely not real, but the level of detail in their rendering makes them feel real and alive. When Lucas enters the world of the ants, there’s an immediacy to it—really lush images and the kind of visceral impact you get with three-dimensional animation that heightens the sense of adventure.” For moviegoers who, like Lucas, want to get an ants-eye view of the action on a larger-than-life scale, the filmmakers also worked with IMAX to prepare a version of The Ant Bully exclusively for IMAX Theatres worldwide. Applying IMAX’s proprietary dual-filmstrip technology to the film’s original 3D modeling, The Ant Bully: An IMAX 3D Experience will project onto screens as high as eight stories for an even more intensely immersive environment. A Kid Could Learn a Lot from an Ant Hanks and Goetzman were in sync with Davis on presenting the story’s multiple themes and life lessons without talking down to young viewers. “Trying to teach kids a lesson cannot be jack-knifed into a movie,” states Hanks. “The meaning of a fable has to be part and parcel to the story being told. What Lucas learns from the ants—that being part of a good family is irreplaceable—is what The Ant Bully tells, not preaches, at its core.”
Davis, a longtime fan of the classically edgy Warner Bros. cartoons, has always strived to maintain a certain level of sophistication in his work, ever mindful of the fact that “kids grasp a lot more than people give them credit for. When I was a kid, I always knew when I was being talked down to and I resented it. The truth is kids are pretty sharp and insightful.” True to his word, Davis admits there were times during production when staffers brought their children in to view early footage and he found they provided worthwhile feedback – in one case even influencing Davis’ ultimate revision to the end of the story. “First and foremost, you want to make something entertaining and fun to watch,” he says. “But along with that, there should also be a purpose, some message that kids and parents can walk away with and feel good about. Otherwise it’s just frivolous, and the experience is over the minute you leave the theater.” Speaking not only from a writer’s point of view, but as a moviegoer, he says, “It’s always more interesting to see characters change throughout the telling of a story, to see them go through struggles and learn something.”
The Ant Bully, notes Davis, “has several related themes that are equally important. Not only does Lucas learn about teamwork, friendship, courage and the value of community when he’s working with the ants, but he also learns about the abuse of power and what it’s like to be in someone else’s position. Originally, when he looks at the ants, he disregards them because they are small and seemingly insignificant, which he feels gives him permission to do whatever he likes with them. It’s not until he sees the ramifications of his actions that he starts to think about how maybe that isn’t the right thing to do.” First, in his skirmishes with bully Steve that always leave him on the losing side, and then later, when he privately pummels the ant hill in retaliation, Lucas alternately plays the roles of victim and bully in the story. It takes him awhile and some very interesting experiences to discover this humbling irony. From that moment of realization, Davis says, “You could then, if you want, extrapolate beyond the level of neighborhood bullies and 10-year-old kids and apply it to other things going on in the world because it’s very much a universal concept. Just because you have the power or the upper hand doesn’t automatically grant you the right to use it.” Meanwhile, in his miniature form, Lucas is constantly surprised, delighted or horrified, and sometimes all three, to learn that things are not always what they seem. Ants can have feelings, frogs that are fun to chase can be fearsome predators, and his own familiar lawn—formerly to Lucas a dull expanse of dry grass between his house and the sidewalk—is actually a territorial battleground abuzz with activity and life-and-death drama like a primeval jungle. Who knew? By changing his perspective, Lucas sees every single thing around him in a whole new way, even things he’s taken for granted his entire life. For this Next Scene, Could You Pretend You’re an Ant Being While retaining the charm and meaning of the John Nickle book, “and staying true to the journey it takes,” grants Davis, The Ant Bully expands the scope of Lucas’ adventures to include additional characters and relationships, obstacles and motives.
All these diverse characters – human or insect – need distinctive voices. Far from the early days of DNA Productions’ first projects, when company founders (and, initially, sole employees) John Davis and Keith Alcorn performed all the voices themselves for their animated shorts, The Ant Bully attracted a stellar voice cast including Oscar winner Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich); Oscar winner Nicolas Cage (Leaving Las Vegas); two-time Oscar winner Meryl Streep (Sophie’s Choice, Kramer vs. Kramer); Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti (Cinderella Man), who recently applied his vocal talent to the animated comedy Robots; Image Award winner and SAG Award nominee Regina King (Ray), whose recent first-time vocal work on the animated series The Boondocks provided the perfect segue into her Ant Bully sessions; Bruce Campbell, beloved by genre fans for his role as Ash in the Evil Dead trilogy; two-time Tony Award winner, Grammy winner and Oscar nominee Lily Tomlin (Nashville); and, a recipient of the Screen Actors Guild Lifetime Achievement Award, Ricardo Montalban. Zach Tyler Eisen (Avatar: The Last Airbender) is the voice of Lucas Nickle, with Cheri Oteri (Scary Movie), Larry Miller (A Mighty Wind) and Allison Mack (Smallville) as the Nickle family. As Davis attests, “Nothing is more important in animation. Vocal performances drive the entire production process and serve as the vital starting point for animators when characters often exist only as preliminary drawings.” Beyond their voices, the actors contribute in myriad subtle ways, through gesture, attitude and inflection, to the final look and posture of their characters. “It’s typical to bring a video camera to the recording sessions,” he explains. “Not so much to associate each line with what the actors are doing at that moment or to copy them exactly, but to give the animators a general feel for their mannerisms and approach. It helps to contour a more specific performance.” At the same time, if they see something particularly effective, they might incorporate it—like the regal way that Meryl Streep, as the Ant Queen, inclines her head toward her subjects when delivering Lucas’ sentence, or the way Ricardo Montalban, as the ants’ Head of Council, illustrates a point by a certain fluid movement of his right hand.
In the book, Lucas is shrunken down to size by an unnamed wizard ant. Onscreen, this becomes the angst-ridden but endearing Wizard Ant Zoc, voiced by Nicolas Cage. Zoc is terribly serious, headstrong and very cautious, with a tireless drive to protect the colony against the human threat. “What I really love about Nic’s characterizations, especially in films like Leaving Las Vegas, and Vampire’s Kiss,” says Davis, “is that he’s able to portray dark and anxious characters with sympathy and charm, even humor. I knew Zoc was going to do a lot of brooding but he couldn’t be too heavy, and I knew Nic would give him the right blend of sarcasm and heart.” Zoc and Hova are very different personalities, and nothing brings this so clearly to the fore than the arrival of Lucas in their midst. At his trial, when the Queen sentences Lucas to live among the ants and learn their ways, Hova optimistically volunteers to mentor the boy, believing there is good in all creatures and that she can help Lucas reform and find his purpose. Zoc meanwhile maintains that humans are incapable of learning ant-centric values, like friendship and teamwork, and fears for Hova’s safety in the presence of her unpredictable human charge. Hova’s growing bond with Lucas and Zoc’s unrelenting suspicion toward the boy drives a wedge between them that prompts several spats. But it’s their rocky romantic rapport that may provide adults in the audience with their most relatable laughs – especially when Zoc, in a moment of supreme self-sacrifice that could only be motivated by love, attempts to get himself swallowed by a frog in order to spare her. As the frog takes deadly aim, poor Zoc is heard to mutter darkly, “No relationship is worth this.”
Ultimately, their struggles and those of their extended insect family prove hugely worthwhile to young Lucas, who needs their help more than he realizes – first, just to survive, and then to become the person he was meant to be. The Queen Ant’s wisdom in handing down his unique sentence also proves beneficial to the ants. Knowing her subjects are eager to punish Lucas the Destroyer for the floods and earthquakes he’s brought upon them, she opts instead to make him live in the colony like one of them. “It’s an inspired decision,” says Meryl Streep, voice of the Queen, acknowledging that, from this point, everything changes. “It’s a pivotal moment; without it there would be no story.” While the Queen rules her colony with absolute authority, to carry out the details she relies upon her venerable Head of Council, here voiced by Ricardo Montalban, whose unmistakable resonance lends gravity to the tiny ant with such monumental responsibilities. Meanwhile, adding their own combustible energy to the mix and working with Hova to train the wayward human is another ant couple: Kreela, a sensible, self-sufficient Forager Ant with a biting wit, voiced by Regina King; and Fugax, a charming swashbuckling Scout Ant with more bravado than brains, voiced by Bruce Campbell. Campbell uses his rich tone and well-known sense of humor to full advantage as the loud, brash and full-of-himself Fugax, who never misses an opportunity to spring into action to impress his ladylove, Kreela. And she isn’t easy to impress.
“Kreela is a very strong ant, if you can imagine that,” says Regina King. “Kreela pretty much assumes things should go her way because she follows the rules, and we should always follow the rules, right? So she tackles everything and everyone like a drill sergeant, which is fun for me. I like playing the tough girl. Meanwhile, Fugax is all over the place, a free spirit, and that’s what makes them fight but is also what attracts them to each other and makes them so funny. I guess it’s as true with ants as it is with humans: opposites attract.” The mother of a 10-year-old boy, King finds the story’s treatment of bullies very valuable, saying, “I don’t know anyone who has not experienced being teased or picked on for one thing or another, and the feeling of isolation it creates. When I read the script, it seemed such perfect timing for my son to receive this message, that this happens to everyone and you’re not alone.” Providing the voice of Lucas is Zach Tyler Eisen, a veteran of numerous animated productions including Nickelodeon’s popular Annie Award-recognized fantasy adventure Avatar: The Last Airbender, The Backyardigans and the Daytime Emmy Award-winning series Little Bill, created by Bill Cosby. Eisen feels his Ant Bully experience proved exciting, “because there’s so much action and Lucas exhibits so many different moods. He’s angry and resentful, sometimes sad, sometimes thrilled beyond belief. You never know what comes next and that’s not only fun to watch, but it’s fun to create.”
Eisen was also pleasantly surprised at the first sight of his onscreen persona, a nearly naked and barefoot boy wearing leaves and random scraps of vegetation like some wild prehistoric warrior. He says, “Lucas looks hilarious. When I saw a picture of him for the first time, I just laughed. It wasn’t till later that I saw the animation in a more developed stage and it’s awesome.” The Ant Bully also introduces Lucas’ family. For Davis, “This gives him a context. It’s important to see where Lucas is coming from, how he interacts with his family at the beginning and how that changes at the end of the story after he’s learned his lessons about community and friendship and putting yourself before others.” Most eccentric among the Nickle clan is Lucas’ loving but somewhat out-to-lunch grandmother, Mommo, voiced by Lily Tomlin. A Jimmy Neutron fan before meeting Davis, Tomlin was intrigued by the spirit of The Ant Bully and describes her character, “a little off the wall. She’s convinced that aliens in flying saucers are going to invade the earth and has rigged up all kinds of apparatus to protect herself and her family from attack. In other words, she’s pixilated and a lot of fun. “At the same time,” Tomlin acknowledges, “she’s wise in that she knows Lucas is being bullied, and she’s there to support and love him.”
Lucas’ parents, Doreen (Cheri Oteri) and Fred (Larry Miller), are equally loving and concerned about Lucas’ problems but currently preoccupied with their own weekend anniversary trip. Meanwhile, his socially connected big sister, Tiffany (Allison Mack), only addresses him in passing or through the closed door of his bedroom, while simultaneously listening to her iPod and yakking on her cell phone. Another character unique to the film is Stan Beals, voiced by Paul Giamatti as a shifty, scheming, unwashed, cigar-smoking exterminator, who enjoys his job so much it’s downright creepy. Beals tricks Lucas into hiring him to fumigate the lawn and essentially wipe out the ant colony along with every other living thing from the house to the sidewalk. But that was before Lucas earned his ant credentials. Now he desperately wants to stop Beals. But how? Creating the Beals character, says Davis, “gives Lucas and his new ant friends a common foe to unite against and fight,” in a climactic battle scene that rallies every crawling, jumping or flying creature in the area. “It also forces him to make a horrible confession in front of the whole colony, in which he admits the exterminator is there because of him, and then has to find a way to regain their trust, to put things right and save them. It shows how much he’s learned and grown.” Of all the unique challenges posed by voicing animation – no set, no stage direction and no costume to help actors get into character – perhaps the most difficult is that there are no other actors with whom to interact. “It’s really more fun to act with other people. This is more like recording rock music in a sound booth,” admits Streep. “You go a little crazy all alone.”
Adds Tomlin, “When you voice animation you sometimes have to let your inhibitions go so you can create the kind of sound or feeling or energy the director wants. Because the animators will draw to your voice, you can allow your face and body to go through all kinds of exaggerated behavior to help create a sound. For instance, in the case of Mommo, whose false teeth fly out of her mouth several times during the story, I had to let go entirely to help create that believability, without worrying about what my own face and body were doing. If I could give the animators a sound that was workable or credible, I knew they could then make it ten times better with their own interpretation.” Davis found that a good portion of his work on The Ant Bully involved traveling across the country to collect performances from his all-star cast, explaining, “Sometimes they were on location or shooting other films. Sometimes I’d record Nic Cage when he was in L.A. and other times he’d be in New York. I recorded Julia Roberts in Taos and L.A. Meryl Streep was in New York; Lily Tomlin most often in L.A.; and for Bruce Campbell I went to Medford, Oregon.” It proved essential to record multiple versions of each scene. “I like to cover the script, but I also like to go off script,” says Davis. “I love to see them play with the material and have fun, but that means I have to get a spectrum of readings. It has to be open-ended enough so that, a month later—when I’m recording the actor who’s going to partner in this scene and he delivers a line that requires something quieter for a set-up—I have a tonal match. Eventually, I have to cut it all together and have it feel organic.” Bringing The Ant Bully to Life in Digital 3D Animation Took Four Years of Mind-bending Work, “For The Ant Bully, we completely gutted our pipeline and built something new. We didn’t use any of the tools we used on Neutron,” offers Davis, a self-taught 3D animator who created his first shorts with off-the-shelf software. “We needed to raise the bar in render quality and the amount of detail and complexity of the characters. That’s what excited the whole team but also killed us for a couple of years. We didn’t have a year of R&D going in; everything happened all at once and, ultimately, it was through sheer force of will, plus blood, sweat and tears that we got the look I wanted within our time and budget limits.
“As far as the software and coding, it’s not so much the tools you use as the process that matters, how you differentiate and attack the problem,” he adds. Development and production on The Ant Bully spanned four years. “Not surprisingly,” Davis says, “what it came down to for us every day was how passionate we were about it, watching the animation evolve and wanting to make it as good as it could be. That’s why we were up there at all hours, because every additional hour was going to make it that much better until it was finally pried out of our hands and it was done.” In terms of sheer volume, says head of Rigging, Michael Comet, “There were upwards of 150 characters in this film and most of them were ants. Each ant has six legs so you’re not just dealing with rigging a human where you have two legs to worry about. Your work is automatically multiplied.” Comet’s team, also known as the joints-and-bones people, created the programs that gave characters a functional support structure. Animators then put them through their paces—manipulating arms, fingers, eyebrows, antennae, and lots of legs—for whatever a scene required, emotionally or physically. It was a back-and-forth process, with the animators sometimes requesting an extended range of motion or expression, and riggers adjusting the program accordingly, from the subtly sweet to the comically extreme.
Using an animatic as their template (the actors’ recorded dialogue wedded to a series of still images edited and sequenced like storyboards), the Ant Bully animators also found it helpful to take a pass at running through a scene themselves while bringing the characters and action to life. “We had an acting room,” notes Davis. “The animators often used it to rehearse a performance in front of a mirror or each other to get the interactions just right and then videotape themselves to prepare for working on a shot.” In the Set Design arena, the creative team devoted themselves to what they jokingly call “grass wrangling.” In a movie where most of the action takes place on a suburban sod lot as wide as the great plains of Nebraska (to an ant), grass is huge—not to mention rocks, leaves and the occasional lawn gnome, each programmed with a pull-down menu to controls its movement, height, rotation, or response to gravity. Modeling, Texture and Shading department technicians further advanced these environments, giving props, such as the refrigerator or the telephone from the Nickle kitchen, the color, texture and shading that enabled them to authentically reflect light as if they were occupying a physical set.
In Character Finalizing, also known as cloth-and-hair, Davis points out, “Details as deceptively simple as the folds on a shirt were carefully crafted. These are the kinds of things that can make or break the overall effect by calling undo attention to themselves if not rendered realistically.” Additionally, says Davis, “There are a lot of effects in The Ant Bully—floods, clouds, bubbles, dust, and Stan the exterminator has a cigar that puts off a lot of smoke.” A sequence where Lucas lands inside the stomach of a hungry frog took three months to develop, with all its “churning fluid, bursting bubbles, drips and oozing.” Other elements are more understated, such as a small cloud of dust blowing upward when Lucas stamps his foot in the dirt.
It all came together in Lighting. As Ant Bully head of Lighting Ian Megibben sums up, “We take in all the work from the other departments like a funnel and create a final cohesive image.” Working closely, he and Davis, with production designer Barry E. Jackson, determined the tone and emotion of a shot through the use of color and light, adding shadows to provide dimension and drawing viewers’ eyes to specific details by lifting them away from the background. “We use the same rules a live-action cinematographer would use, but the big difference is we have no limits on location,” Megibben explains. “We can place a light where you could never place it on a practical set. We can put lights inside characters’ mouths or focus them on a character’s shoes but not his pants. On the other hand, we have issues traditional cinematographers don’t face. Real-world lights have characteristics we can only fake, like reflections and bounce, which we have to study and reproduce.” Meanwhile, keeping pace with the action and complementing Lucas’ adventures and insights is The Ant Bully’s lively score.
Composer John Debney, a multiple Emmy winner and recent Oscar nominee for his work on Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ, reunites with Davis on The Ant Bully. Previously, the two collaborated on Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius and found themselves well matched in work ethic and enthusiasm. “Not only is he phenomenally versatile and talented as a composer,” cites Davis, “he’s interested in getting into a project early and trying things as production develops, like playing a moment from one character’s perspective and then trying it from another. “I loved the way he used traditional ethnic instruments in The Passion,” adds Davis, who was looking for that kind of range on The Ant Bully, set in essentially an uncharted wilderness for Lucas, and the underground caverns of the ant colony. “I wanted a sort of tribal sound, strange percussion and woodwinds, for an exotic and primordial feel when Lucas goes into that unknown world.”
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