- Adorkable: Z is very quirky and neurotic, but still lovable nonetheless.
- Alas, Poor Scrappy: Muffy. She's condescending and nauseating, but she doesn't deserve to get crushed by a flyswatter — complete with a shot of her dead body (if anything, she's killed because she wanted to give Z and Bala some food, but is briefly distracted by some snuggly time with her husband Chip). Even Z and Bala, who were uncomfortable around the two wasps, are shocked and dismayed after witnessing her death, with the latter breathing, "Oh, no!"
- Aluminum Christmas Trees: It seems outlandish to portray ants drinking fluid from the orifices of other insects (aphids). They actually do.
- Animation Age Ghetto: The film was highly successful both financially and critically despite being rated PG (a rarity for animated films at the time). But nowadays, bowdlerised versions of it get aired on TV channels geared toward children.
- Anti-Climax Boss: Despite being the Big Bad of the movie, General Mandible goes down in a fairly anti-climactic way. His confrontation with Z lasts less than a minute before he stupidly tackles himself and Z off the ledge in a Villainous Breakdown, only resulting in his own death while failing to kill Z.
- Awesome Music: One of
the best
soundtracks
in animated film
history
. Seriously.
- Catharsis Factor: In rapid succession, Cutter finally turning on Mandible; Mandible falling onto a root and getting crushed on impact and Cutter swooping down to save Z all makes for a very satisfying and entertaining climax.
- Complete Monster: General Mandible is a megalomaniac ant soldier who views worker ants as inferior vermin and soldiers as superior. He manipulates the Queen into rejecting peace negotiations with a hostile colony of Termites and sends all the soldiers loyal to her on a suicide mission to attack the Termites and secure his power. Both sides are destroyed in the fight except for Z, which irritates him to no end. He then engineers a new dig for the miners so they will hit a water source that will drown every ant in the colony including the Queen, except for his small faction of army loyalists who will be blindly obedient to him. He tortures Weaver to find Princess Bala after Z took her away, threatens to kill Azteca if he doesn't comply, then orders Z killed seconds after he promised not to do so and arranges Weaver's death as well. To start his new ideal colony he plans to force Princess Bala to marry him after he has killed her mother and everyone else.
- Director Displacement: Many thought that Woody Allen directed it since he had a lot of flair stuck in this film.
- Ensemble Dark Horse:
- Cutter is considered this even by detractors. He's a stoic badass who's terrifyingly competent and has one of the film's most compelling character arcs... and he's voiced by Christopher Walken to boot.
- Despite having only around five minutes of screen time, Barbatus is one the most well-like characters in the movie thanks to Danny Glover's memorably charismatic performance and having a legitimately tragic death scene.
- Fandom Rivalry: With A Bug's Life, due to both being bug-themed animated movies that came out in the same year at almost the same time. Also doubles as Hilarious in Hindsight as Gene Hackman would be succeeded in the role of Lex Luthor by Kevin Spacey (who voiced A Bug's Life's Big Bad Hopper) in a movie that served as a standalone sequel to Superman II.
- Hilarious in Hindsight:
- It's rather odd to see Woody Allen and Sharon Stone play love interests when, only two years later, they would star in Picking Up The Pieces playing Husband and Wife where the Wife gets murdered by the Husband in the beginning of the film. It's also ironic considering Stone's feature film debut was in Stardust Memories as an actress on a train flirting with Allen.
- This won't be the last DreamWorks film involving animals who live in Central Park.
- And let's not forget the studio's following film about another insect nine years later, which is not only the complete opposite tone of this film but which stars a different comedian who was heavily influenced by the star of this film.
- Memetic Mutation:
- "Who the hell is THAT?!"
- "AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAANNNNTTTTZZZZ!!!!!!!"
- "That one scene in Antz but in real life."

- Narm: Bala's hysterical screaming while she's stuck on a gum at the bottom of a sneaker. It sounds like something more fitting for a horror movie rather than for an animated flick like this.
- Overshadowed by Controversy: Despite being the second American All-CGI Cartoon feature ever as well as Dreamworks’ first feature release, the heated tensions the movie caused between DreamWorks and Pixar is perhaps its biggest legacy when discussed today.
- Questionable Casting:
- Christopher Walken as the sane and hyper-competent Cutter, causing an expressive and eccentric voice with what is supposed to be a stern secondary character.
- Despite the uncredited rewrites he did to suit his style, it can still feel weird to hear Woody Allen's voice coming out of an animated character. And while the film isn't necessarily for children, the action-adventure plot is clearly meant more for audiences younger than the typical jaded adults who are used to the kind of banal, Slice of Life stories he's often associated withnote .
- "Seinfeld" Is Unfunny: Owing to PDI's history as a studio heavily involved with the burgeoning VFX industry before making the movie as one of its frontrunners. A lot of technical achievements they accomplished with the film (notably the fluid and crowd simulations) can be taken for granted these days thanks to computer animation in general being improved upon in the years since.
- So Okay, It's Average: General controversy about its perceived copying aside, it's generally considered to be a decent starter film for DreamWorks Animation and is an interesting enough romp to check out, but it fails to stack up to the more popular films the studio has produced.
- Squick: During the campfire scene a fly tastes a literal crap and even comments "Not bad."
- They Copied It, So It Sucks!:
- John Lasseter felt double-crossed when he heard about this film being produced, considering he discussed the general idea of A Bug's Life with Jeffrey Katzenberg before he left under bad circumstances to form DreamWorks. The fact that Katzenberg then offered to stop production if Disney rescheduled the Pixar film away from his major film, The Prince of Egypt, ticked him off more as blackmail. The experience didn't help Lasseter's relationship with Disney boss Michael Eisner either: Eisner had ordered A Bug's Life to open the same day as The Prince of Egypt a la Don Bluth's old strategy and withheld a $90 million bonus in an attempt to bankrupt DreamWorks out of the gate, which was one of the reasons for Antz's creation. A federal judge ordered Disney to pay up the bonus and tripled it, foiling that plan.
- It should be said though that apart from having talking insects and having ants as main characters, the two films are overall incredibly different movies. They have almost nothing in common. Even their Aesops are different; one is about finding individuality, and the other is about working together as a team.
- They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: The worker revolution that starts up once word begins to spread that Z went against the ant colony's system pretty much disappears completely after General Mandible's speech wins back the workers.
- Too Cool to Live: Barbatus, one of the few soldiers loyal to the Queen and bites the dust after finally being reduced to a head.
- Unintentional Uncanny Valley:
- The ants themselves tend to suffer from this, due to their semi-realistic humanlike faces
. - Despite being The Faceless here, the human that Z and Bala encounter still falls into this due to the stretched out proportions to make him look giant, and being only a lower torso with a stiff walking animation.
- The ants themselves tend to suffer from this, due to their semi-realistic humanlike faces
- Visual Effects of Awesome: Despite showing its age a little, this film greatly captures the massive scope of a small being's world, thanks to the groundbreaking effects this movie showed.
- What Do You Mean, It's Not for Kids?: This film is considered to be one of the most mature movies DreamWorks has made. While it's rated PG, it's a much harder PG than, say, Shrek — a couple of "damns" wouldn't shock most people, but the humor is more in line with Woody Allen's other, more clearly adult-aimed work ("You know, I was gonna let you become part of my most erotic fantasies..."). And then there's the violence. Not helping is that the vast majority of merchandise is aimed at children.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/YMMV/Antz
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