Hacker Cinema
Antz
1998 · Film · 83 min
Directed by Eric Darnell, Tim Johnson
A neurotic worker ant in love with a rebellious princess rises to unlikely stardom when he switches places with a soldier. Signing up to march in a parade, he ends up under the command of a bloodthirsty general. But he's actually been enlisted to fight against a termite army.
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8 comments on Hacker News
As someone from the US, I thought we were the leaders in choosing strange government figureheads, until Canada elected the head of a foreign bank as their's.
That speech reminds me of the conclusion the main character in the movie Antz settled on. Being forced to be a cog in the machine is awful and no one should accept it. Instead we should be happy to volunteer ourselves to be cogs in the machine.
Movies like that are often only canonized as "good" in retrospect, after there's been time for them to marinate in the wider culture and have some consensus form around their significance and general quality. Around the time of American History X, your local theater probably would have been showing Antz, Rush Hour, The Rugrats Movie, and There's Something About Mary.
The main thing I learned from (a link in) this article is that Bin Laden had Charlie Bit My Finger in his personal collection?!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-41840864
> The al-Qaeda leader had a series of animated films on his hard drive including Antz, Cars, Chicken Little and The Three Musketeers. There were also several YouTube videos, including a viral clip from the UK called "Charlie bit my finger" and videos about crocheting, including one entitled "How to crochet a flower". The role-playing computer game Final Fantasy VII was also on the computer.
FF VII is actually a really good choice if you’re stuck inside for months or years on end. I’m baffled as to how OBL came to understand that, though.
The problem with ants is that they have a weird sexual structure. For a female ant it is better to have sister than to have their own children. So they just kidnap their mother and force her to have more and more sisters. [1]
On the other hand, termites have a sex structure more similar to humans, so it can be a better example.
[1] The movie "Antz" is completely wrong.
> In 1995, with the release date of Toy Story nearing, Katzenberg visited with his old friend John Lasseter and asked him what Pixar's next project would be. Lasseter told Katzenberg about a film surrounding a group of insects and the world they inhabit. This film would eventually become A Bug's Life.
> Later that year, Katzenberg and Dreamworks announced that it would be releasing Antz, the studio's first 3D animated film about... a group of insects and the world they inhabit.
I always suspected that there was something going on between those movies. There it is.
The bees (like the ants and wasps) are hymenopters. The sex determination and matting habits are very different of used in mammals (and in particular humans). So a female is more related to her sisters than to her own children. Then for her it is preferable to help her mother to have more female offspring. (This behavior is determined genetically, not a "free" choice of each individual.)
So it is not a good idea to try to extrapolate the ideas of how a society should be organized from bees, ants or wasp to mammals or humans, or vice versa. (Like in the movie "Antz".)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hymenoptera#Sex_determination
One thing you don't realize about the movie industry is that parts of it actually move a lot slower than you think.
Some of these scripts (actually, most of them) float around Hollywood for years, even a decade or longer. They get pushed from studio to studio, shopped around, then suddenly a director or star takes interest in it and a project begins to form.
One can definitely infer once the wheels start moving on a picture (OMG Brad Pitt signed on to do Freakonomics:The Movie!) and word spreads that copycats definitely pop up to try and take some of the action.
You can also add [A Bug's Life (Nov 1998) -> Antz (Oct 1998)] to your list. There's some background here: http://www.businessweek.com/1998/47/b3605013.htm
you think an online food marketplace is a unique idea? Geo-location services? Unique?
Why do you think so often two similar movies are released close to each other (Antz & Bugs Life, Volcano & that crappier one, etc, etc)
Better example: When http://nowdothis.com/ came out, another 2 or 3 alternatives came out within a week of each other -- you think people "stole" these ideas from each other? I think it's far more likely that people just came up with similar ideas.