![]() "Filmgoers want to go somewhere new," he said. He thinks there's room for them all, as long they offer something fresh. It's due in mid-December, when not only "Antz" and "A Bug's Life" but "A Rugrats Movie" are likely to be taking up multiplex space. Johnson is quite high on DreamWorks' other feature-length cartoon, "Prince of Egypt," which will use more traditional animation techniques to tell the story of Moses. Maybe we should have done more, but you could also have too much of a good thing." "Only after we'd quite literally finished it, cutting together all the footage, did we realize it was one of the funnier things in the picture. "You discover your film as you make it," said Johnson. Two of the funniest supporting characters, a pair of "waspy wasps" voiced by Jane Curtin and Dan Aykroyd, are in and out quicker than the sneaky Siamese cats in Disney's "Lady and the Tramp," but they make a lasting impression. Kids are glued to `The Simpsons' and they don't understand half the references." "All you know is to be true to yourself and be honest, even if some lines go spinning right over a kid's head. "You don't know what kids laugh at," he said. "He was really intrigued with animation."Ī veteran of "The Simpsons," Johnson didn't worry too much about going over the heads of children with Allen's dialogue, which recalls his creative coward in the 23-year-old "Love and Death." "When we showed it to him, he asked, `How did you get me in there?' " said Johnson. Johnson came up with a trial reel in which lines from Allen's comedy "Bananas" came out of a cartoon character. The script was written for "a Woody Allen type," but Jeffrey Katzenberg, another of DreamWorks' founders, knew Allen and suggested it to him. "Woody Allen would do things like changing `yes' to `absolutely' when he's asked to dance, to give it that little neurotic edge." "In the script, we'd gone too far, making the princess so spoiled she was unlikable, but Sharon made her believable and helped to balance out the character," said Johnson. In "Antz," the heiress is a princess with the voice of Sharon Stone the male is Woody Allen, who provides the voice of the ant hero, Z. They also watched Frank Capra's "It Happened One Night," which features a runaway heiress who hooks up with a less powerful male. Johnson and his co-director, Eric Darnell, spent a lot of time looking at such futuristic classics as Terry Gilliam's "Brazil" and Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" the latter was an inspiration "both thematically and visually." "DreamWorks was thinking of a similar idea, but they were considering live action, thinking of puppets, and it made sense to bring them together." "It was always the story of insects, and one who wants to be an individual, who thinks `there's gotta be something better than this,' " said Johnson. While there have been accusations that DreamWorks borrowed the idea from Disney, Johnson claims he started his first script for "Antz" in 1991, when he called it "Lights Out." After several years of rewrites, the script was presented to DreamWorks and green-lighted around the same time "Toy Story" became a hit. Opening in hundreds of theaters today, "Antz" will now finish ahead of Disney's computer-animated follow-up to "Toy Story," called "A Bug's Life," which also features an ant as its hero. ![]() "He said, `Well, guys, you've got a great-looking movie, even now, so put the pedal down and finish it.' " "Last November, we showed what we had to Steven Spielberg (one of DreamWorks' founders), and told him we were a little early," Johnson said, in a phone interview from New York. But Johnson claims that "Antz," which is being released five months ahead of schedule, wasn't a rush job. ![]() Some of the more elaborate effects, including a flood sequence that was considered impossible until recently, were completed just a couple of months ago. ![]() "I like to think it combines the best of animation and live action." "It's a very tactile medium," said Tim Johnson, who co-directed "Antz," the new DreamWorks cartoon. Computer animation has come a long way, even since the debut of "Toy Story" just three years ago. ![]()
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