(bright music)
- What's up guys, Michael here.
Today, let's take a trip down memory lane
and explore one of the most bitter feuds
in cinematic history.
No, not Marvel versus DC or Clint Eastwood versus chairs.
- What do you mean shut up?
- We're talking about the age old rivalry
between two of the most successful animation studios
of our time, Pixar versus Dreamworks.
The battle between these toon powerhouses all began in 1998
with two little films, about two little ants.
Which may or may not have come from the same idea,
but we'll save IP battles for the lawyers.
We're talking "A Bug's Life" and "Antz."
On face value, there's every reason to assume
that these are two versions of the same movie.
They begin with the same premise,
a misfit ant can't conform to the
highly regimented rules of his world.
But despite sharing basically the same jumping off point,
the movies go on to explore different themes
and come to very different conclusions.
And in the process, they explore some very relevant
economic and political philosophies.
- Finally I'm a beautiful butterfly.
- No, really.
So let's dig down the anthill in this Wisecrack edition
on "A Bug's Life" versus "Antz."
Are all ants equal?
And of course, spoilers ahead for two movies,
about a bunch of bugs.
But we've talked before about how animated films
revolving around insect colonies can be
damn effective allegories about human societies.
And it's not hard to see why.
Insect colonies are highly efficient,
rigidly structured social systems
in which each individual occupies a specific role.
This makes them apt analogies for modern societies and a
great backdrop for a plucky non-conforming protagonist.
Add that to the fact that in the late nineties
ants seemed like a relatively easy animal
to bring to life with still nascent computer animation.
And you can see why this idea had legs.
Six likes to be exact.
Now the shared setup of the two films,
destined them to explore the conflict between
individualism and conformity.
But the way the two protagonists
express their individualism,
and the way their efforts pan out,
reflects a stark ideological difference.
Both movies depict an ant colony as a
highly regimented society in which each individual ant is a
worker, a member of the nobility, or,
in the case of Antz, a soldier.
In A Bug's Life, the work is largely agricultural.
Gathering food for the winter months.
- That's it, that's it, good!
You're doing great!
There you go. There you go!
- [Michael] This is because the ants have to gather
enough food, not only for themselves,
but also for a roving gang of grasshoppers.
This is loosely based off one of Aesop's fables.
The ants colony in A Bug's Life
thus resembles a mostly pre-industrial colonial society
where the colonists, the grasshoppers,
are extracting natural resources from the ants
through the exploitation of their labor.
That's not unlike the way colonial powers like France
exploited the resources and labor of Algeria.
In exchange, the grasshoppers offer a
vague veil of protection from other scary bugs
who might do the ants even more harm.
- Listen, if you don't keep your end of the bargain,
then I can't guarantee your safety.
- Here are the exploitation of the ants is being painted as
being in their best interest.
This too is not unlike the way a colonial powers like France
justified their colonization.
By saying that they were actually acting in the
Algerians best interest,
specifically by quote unquote civilizing them,
when they were in actuality violently oppressing them.
Importantly, A Bug's Life also shows a society that's
steeped in tradition and highly resistant to change.
- With Flick gone he can't..
- He can't mess anything up.
- [Michael] When Flick introduces a machine that can make
gathering food go faster, he's dismissed and mocked.
- This is my new idea for harvesting grain.
No more picking individual kernels,
you can just cut down the entire stock.
- Flick, we don't have time for this.
- Exactly!
- [Michael] This lightly evokes some of the growing pains of
industrialization where machines drastically changed the
skills needed to perform tasks that humans had been
doing for centuries.
In contrast, Antz depicts the colony as an
explicitly industrial society
complete with unreliable public transit.
Workers are made to constantly dig tunnels, haul dirt,
and form wrecking balls out of their own bodies.
The entire colony resembles a modern factory floor
complete with motivational posters that discourage idleness.
The workers, perhaps coincidentally, resemble miners,
an industry famous for widespread labor strikes and
brutal crackdowns on them.
The other faction of the colony in Antz is the military.
Soldiers in the society enjoy a higher social status
than the lowly workers.
- Why'd I have to be born a worker?
You soldiers get all the glory.
Plus you get to go out in the world.
You know, you're meeting interesting insects,
you get to kill em.
- [Michael] Even though the selection process to
determine their status is comically arbitrary.
- Worker.
- Soldier.
- This emphasis on a strong military,
along with a highly productive workforce,
resembles have a lot of industrial societies
organized themselves after the first World War.
The mass mobilization of an unprecedented number of
military personnel occurred alongside an
equally unprecedented increase in industrial production.
This created nations where nearly every citizen was involved
in at least one of those aspects of society.
This made for even stronger national identities.
We see this same sense of nationalism
throughout the society depicted in Antz,
where every member exists primarily to
contribute to the colony
rather than to realize their own ambitions.
- A soldier knows that the life of an
individual ant doesn't matter.
What matters is the colony.
- From these two highly homogenous societies,
we get our two heroes, Flick and Z.
Both exemplify individualism in the face of an
overwhelmingly conformist environment.
For Flick, this is expressed through his
ingenuity and inventiveness,
à la, his new harvesting machine.
But his genius is unappreciated by the ruling class
who wants him to simply fall in line and
contribute to the common cause of the colony.
In this way, Flick seems to evoke the
ideals of author Ayn Rand.
Her novel, The Fountainhead, centers around an architect
who also struggles to bring his new ideas to fruition
in an overwhelmingly conformist society.
Near the end of the novel,
the architect gives a speech that encapsulates
Rand's philosophy of individualism.
Stating "The great creators, the thinkers, the artists,
the scientists, the inventors stood alone against
the men of their time.
Every great new thought was opposed.
Every great new invention was denounced."
According to Rand, the wealth of nations was created
by these indispensable innovators
and any attempt to stifle their brilliance was
an attack on their individual liberty.
This proved a very convenient philosophy
if you were one of these innovators.
And that is still enjoyed by certain space traveling,
union busting, tax evading gazillionaires today.
Z, on the other hand, is not a man of the mind,
at least in the Randian sense.
He's simply a disaffected worker whose role in
industrial society has rendered him insignificant.
- The whole system makes me feel insignificant.
- Excellent.
You've made a real breakthrough.
- I have?
- Yes, Z. You are insignificant.
- [Michael] Z feels utterly unfulfilled as a
worker for the colony and
longs for a life where he can be his own insect.
Philosopher, Karl Marx, might've said he was
alienated from his work.
Marx argued that industrial capitalism not only
alienates the worker from the product of their labor,
it also alienates them from their own agency and humanity.
Reducing the individual to nothing more than
a cog in the grand machine of industrialism.
The film is not subtle about invoking Marx's philosophy.
- A worker can't do anything except for work.
- Yeah, it's not like we got a choice.
- [Michael] Unlike it's Disney Pixar counterpart,
the Dreamworks production is much more explicit
in its political themes.
- It's the workers who control the means of production.
- It even takes subtle shots at
Randian philosophy and its imagery.
Throughout the film, we see a statue that depicts
an ant carrying a large ball of dirt on its back.
The statue is likely a direct reference to the statue of
Atlas that adorns the cover of Rand's seminal work,
Atlas Shrugged.
But replacing the celestial sphere carried by the
mythical Titan with the ant equivalent of a boulder
also invokes a different Greek myth.
The punishment of Sisyphus who was made to
continuously push a boulder up a hill
only to have it rolled back down once it gets to the top.
A symbol of the virtues of industrialism
thus becomes a symbol of the futility of fruitless labor.
This neatly sums up Z's outlook on his life
within the colony,
as well as Marx's critique of industrial capitalism.
Already, we can see how these two heroes embody
almost contradictory philosophies
while still both being motivated by individualism
in the face of conformity.
Both protagonists embark on pretty standard hero's quest and
both seem to succeed pretty quickly.
Albeit only through misleading their fellow ants.
- No, I, I just..
- You lied, Flick. You lied to her.
You lied to the colony.
You lied to me.
- After some humiliation,
both heroes eventually take on their oppressors,
inspire the masses, and ultimately
rely on the strength of their communities and
their sheer numbers to vanquish the bad guys.
In this way, both protagonists inspire their colonies to
rise up in a revolutionary act against oppressors
they had long obeyed without question.
I know what you're thinking, these are the same movie.
But they're really not.
Trust us. We're going somewhere with this.
Sure, the two films have different plot twists,
different symbolism, and different cringey flirting
between worker ant and princess.
- You talk too much.
- I think I'm about to become this strong, silent type.
- This is of course made all the cringier by the casting,
but we digress.
But what's most interesting to us are the films
two conclusions about these acts of revolution and
the new world orders they result in.
A Bug's Life ends with the ants overthrowing
their colonial oppressors,
adopting Flick's harvesting technology,
and generally living happily ever after.
This reiterates, the idea of great men in the
Randian tradition, who should be listened to
by virtue of them being great.
The subtle ends of inequality go further.
The princess gets her crown,
suggesting that the rigid order within the anthill
will remain largely the same.
Even if the ants are now more efficient gatherers
who can sneak in an occasional siesta.
Antz, on the other hand,
does something arguably more interesting.
Notably, the villainous warrior ant's evil plan is to
use the anthill's new expanded tunnel to
flood the anthill and drown the lowly workers.
Here the supposedly progress of expanding the anthill and
making the colony stronger,
relies on the destruction of all the workers
who made it possible in the first place.
While technology in A Bug's Life makes things
indisputably better, progress in Antz ends up
threatening the lives of all the workers.
This too is Marxist in its condemnation of
endless economic progress at the expense of the workers
who enable that progress.
Antz seems to get that you can't disconnect technology and
industry from political power.
Ultimately, A Bug's Life suggests that the
class order of your average anthill is perfectly fine
so long as you're not being oppressed by
creatures twice your size.
Monarchy good, colonialism bad.
On the other hand, Antz suggests that the system itself
is fundamentally broken.
A Bug's Life depicts outside forces,
i.e. grasshoppers, as the problem,
but Antz suggests the class structures within the colony
are to blame for oppression.
Adding to that, A Bug's Life never really questions
the contention that the princess's life is more valuable
than that of a worker ant.
Indeed the colony watches Flick get beaten up by a
very scary grasshopper for a while without intervening.
It's only when that princess throws herself in front of him
that they all rally.
In contrast, the conflict in Antz is fundamentally
about the disparities in power and opportunities
afforded to ants based on their birthright as
workers, soldier, or nobility.
Z, perhaps not coincidentally
the last letter of the alphabet,
stands up to the princess and
demands to be treated with respect.
- I order you to stop, worker.
- Hey, I got a name, okay?
It's Z.
- [Michael] And ultimately the film champions the
equal importance of every ant in
contributing to the survival of the colony.
This emphasis on the inherent value and equality of
every individual is in line with the tradition of
Marxist humanism, or in this case, antism.
But interestingly,
or depressingly whether or not you stan Marx,
Antz doesn't do what A Bug's Life does.
It doesn't really offer a solution to the problems
faced by its anthill.
In the conclusion, all the main character says is,
- [Z] There you have it.
Your average boy meets girl, boy likes girl,
boy changes underlying social order story.
- However, the film never really tells us
what the existing social order was replaced with.
Z does note that the anthill has been rebuilt and
now has an indoor swimming pool.
While this is probably a joke about
the flood in the previous scene,
you could charitably interpret it to mean that
the workers might get some more leisure time going forward.
Kinda like how you can play ping pong at your
60 hour a week startup job.
Still, we don't get a definitive conclusion
about how you can avoid oppressive social structures
entirely in the context of an anthill or, allegorically,
in the context of human society.
In this way, although Antz is certainly the more
radical of the two films,
it arguably does itself a disservice by
failing to show that there is indeed another way.
In a way, the conclusion arguably reflects an
overall lack of political imagination in the west
to posit an alternative to industrial capitalism.
Or as the line that is often attributed to
Frederick Jameson goes,
"It's easier to imagine the end of the world
than the end of capitalism."
Antz claims that the ants rallied to build a new world,
but fails to imagine what that new world might look like.
But what do you think?
Are we over analyzing a couple of fun,
silly kids movies about ants,
or can we find surprisingly deep meditations on modern life
in even the smallest of places?
Let us know in the comments.
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And as always, thanks for watching. Later.
(upbeat music)