Imagination returns to animation with 'The Ant Bully'

It's taken a while, but the summer has finally coughed up a truly imaginative animated feature.

Based on a book by John Nickle that producer Tom Hanks used to read to his son, "The Ant Bully" is the tale of 10-year-old Lucas (voiced by Zach Tyler), a bespectacled pipsqueak with too-busy parents, a "whatever" older sister and a neighborhood bully who constantly torments him. Enduring such daily humiliation, Lucas in turn takes out his frustrations on a nearby ant hill.

Warner Bros. Pictures 'The Ant Bully' B The verdict: You'll be bugged — in the right way. Director: John A. Davis Starring: Lily Tomlin, Larry Miller, Julia Roberts, Zach Tyler Eisen, Cheri Oteri Run time: 88 minutes Release date: July 28, 2006 Rating: PG for some mild rude humor and action. See showtimes Know your ants With three animated ant films in eight years, you need a guide to this popular pest. On the web Official movie site View the trailer    Trailers require Quicktime Rate 'The Ant Bully'   Go see it   Make it a matinee   Wait to rent   Don't bother Voter Limit: Once per Hour View Poll Results

But he has no idea what sort of havoc he wreaks. When he turns a water hose on the colony, it's like a Biblical flood for the ants.

Lucas the Destroyer, as he's known down under, must be stopped, and to that end, a wizard ant named Zoc (Nicolas Cage) cooks up a magic potion. Taking a page from "Hamlet," he pours the concoction into the sleeping boy's ear.

And presto: Lucas is downsized. Big time. Now no larger than the bugs he once tormented, he's brought before the Ant Queen (Meryl Streep, sounding like a Psychic Friend). She decrees he can't become a human again until he becomes like an ant — that is, he learns the value of teamwork and not always putting himself before everyone else. Volunteering to be his mentor, Zoc's girlfriend Hova (Julia Roberts) solicitously asks Lucas if he has any skills. "I can make milk come out of my sister's nose," he offers.

Visually, "Cars" looks much better and "Monster House" looks more, well, unusual. Still, "The Ant Bully's" animation can be quite impressive. There are some amazing action pieces, such as a wasp attack on the colony and a competition in which Lucas' teammates build sensational ant bridges and ladders as if they were a bouncy bunch of Chinese acrobats.

The climax, which pits the insect world against an exterminator (Paul Giamatti) has the zing of an old World War II movie. And along with the ants, who include a dunderheaded scout ant (Bruce Campbell) and a tough-minded forager ant (Regina King), there are several other interesting characters, such as a woebegone glowworm and a Clint Eastwood-ish wasp leader.

"The Ant Bully" is the first of the summer's many animated features that doesn't somehow feel familiar. The "there is no me in team" message certainly isn't original, but it's presented in an unconventional way, thanks to the film's skewed perspectives, insect-centric world and sometimes semi-surreal humor.

Drawing on the same appealing contrasts that made the '50s live-action sci-fi classic "The Incredible Shrinking Man" so memorable, "The Ant Bully" shows us a discarded soda can the size of the Empire State Building. When the shrunken Lucas returns to his house on an emergency mission, the shag carpet looms like an impenetrable jungle. A frantic colony-threatening near-catastrophe inside the ants' mound turns up, from a human point of view, as a tiny puff of smoke on the lawn.

And don't worry. The kids will still get their quota of icky bodily-fluid jokes. From a frog's gastric juices to Giamatti's friendly hair lice, there's plenty of gag-reflex clowning around. The small ones at the screening I attended seemed to eat it up. Even, ugh, the bit with the caterpillar poop.