‘The Ant Bully’ becomes pet project for Tom Hanks
It’s great to have fans in high places. Just ask John A. Davis. The animator-turned-director made a splash with his pen-and-ink hit, “Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius” (2001), which was nominated for an Oscar in the animated-feature category. He also wrote and produced the family picture, which impressed Tom Hanks with its visual style and quirky charm.
One day, Hanks’ son, Truman, borrowed a book, John Nickle’s “The Ant Bully,” from the library in his kindergarten, and asked his father to read it to him.
Hanks was touched by the story’s themes about the destructive power of bullying, purchased the screen rights and remembered how impressed he had been with the big-screen version of “Jimmy Neutron.”
“I was looking for a project, Tom thought the book would make a good movie and he sent it to me,” Davis said during a Philadelphia publicity stop for “The Ant Bully,” which opened July 28. “I had a meeting with Tom and we spoke the same language.
“I’m a big fan of Ray Harryhausen (who developed the stop-motion animation process for fantasy films such as “The 7th Voyage of Sinbad”), and so is Tom. We talked about taking a Harryhausen approach for the set pieces in the (computer-animated) film.”
According to the film’s production notes, Hanks and Davis designed a wasp-attack sequence as a tribute to the skeleton battle in Harryhausen’s favorite “Jason and the Argonauts” (1963).
Thanks to Hanks, Davis was also able to attract the dream team of Oscar-winners Julia Roberts (“Erin Brockovich”), Nicolas Cage (“Leaving Las Vegas”) and Meryl Streep (“The Devil Wears Prada”) to perform voices of ant characters in the PG-rated picture.
“Having Tom as a producer immediately validated the project and gave us access to the stars,” Davis said. “They responded to the material.”
According to the 44-year-old filmmaker, Roberts was particularly interested due to her personal situation.
“With Julia, getting her to perform in ‘The Ant Bully’ was good timing, because she had just had her twins,” Davis said. “She was a mom, and her (ant) character is very maternal and takes charge of mentoring and teaching (the title character).
“Doing the voice in the film was a logical extension of where she was (emotionally) at the time.”
In the story, a 10-year-old boy meanly floods and tramples ant colonies. He then learns a lesson about bullying after being shrunk to the size of an insect and seeing how his random acts of meanness destroy the tiny creatures and their surprisingly sophisticated world.
During the many months of making the film, Davis noticed how the subject of bullying was appearing more often in news and talk shows.
“I saw CNN do a story on bullying the other day, so dealing with the subject is now a universal theme,” he said. “Bullying isn’t just about playground politics anymore. It now involves politics in general.
“There’s bullying between adults and countries, and those situations point out the whole (destructive) idea of picking on someone smaller than you.”
A ‘Fatal’ girlfriend
In the romantic fantasy, “My Super Ex-Girlfriend,” Luke Wilson (“Rushmore”) plays a single guy falling for a woman (Uma Thurman of “Kill Bill, Vol. 1”) who turns out to be all wrong for him.
Unfortunately for his character, the woman, who’s really a superhero with drastic mood shifts and incredible powers, reacts to his idea of splitting up by stalking him and using her abilities to make his life miserable.
When Wilson read the script, he saw the story line as sometimes being closer to a scary revenge thriller than a glossy romantic comedy.
“It’s like ‘Fatal Attraction’ in a lot of ways,” the 34-year-old Wilson says of the film in the current issue of Playboy magazine. “It’ll touch a nerve with men, but they’ll probably get the wrong message from it.
“I remember when ‘Fatal Attraction’ (starring Michael Douglas and Glenn Close) came out (in 1987), most guys didn’t walk away thinking, ‘Hey, maybe it’s wrong to cheat.’ They left the movie thinking, ‘You’ve got to be careful with crazy women.'”
Wilson remains in the shadow of his older brother, Owen (“Wedding Crashers” and “You, Me and Dupree”), but he certainly has no shortage of screen assignments.
According to the Internet Movie Database, Wilson’s upcoming projects include:
– “Idiocracy,” a comedy about an average guy who agrees to participate in a Pentagon experiment that puts him into hibernation for 1,000 years. Upon awakening, he discovers that people have allowed themselves to be dumbed down and he’s the most intelligent person alive. Maya Rudolph (TV’s “Saturday Night Live”) co-stars.
– “You Kill Me,” a crime comedy about a hit man who has made some professional blunders and must get his career back on track. Tea Leoni (“Fun With Dick and Jane”) co-stars.
– “Barry Munday,” a comedy about a sad-sack guy who is attacked, discovers that his family fortune has been stolen and finds himself facing a paternity lawsuit filed by a woman who’s a total stranger. Zooey Deschanel (“Elf”) co-stars.
– “Vacancy,” a thriller about a married couple who become trapped at an isolated hotel and then suspect that they’re about to murdered in a snuff film. Sarah Jessica Parker (HBO’s “Sex and the City”) co-stars.
– “Dallas,” an adaptation of the famous TV nighttime soap in which Wilson is negotiating to play Bobby Ewing. John Travolta and Jennifer Lopez have signed to play J.R. and Sue Ellen Ewing.
– “Old School 2,” a sequel with Wilson and his original cohorts, Vince Vaughn and Will Ferrell, going back to college to introduce a new crop of students to fraternity fun involving guzzling beer, chasing coeds, hazing freshmen and harassing administrators.
Casting calls
– Hong Kong favorite Chow Yun-fat (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) will be going toe-to-toe with Johnny Depp’s Captain Jack Sparrow character in “Pirates of the Caribbean 3,” arriving in theaters on May 25, 2007.
According to Entertainment Weekly, Yun-fat will play Capt. Sao Feng, a bandit also in search of treasure, which of course brings him into contact with the high-seas trio of Depp, Keira Knightley and Orlando Bloom.
– Taiwanese filmmaker Ang Lee, who won an Oscar as best director for “Brokeback Mountain,” will next tackle “Lust, Caution,” which will be filmed in China.
Asian cinema favorite Tony Leung (“Hero”) will star in the espionage thriller, which is set in Shanghai during World War II and concerns a powerful politician.
– Director Michel Gondry, whose credits range from “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” with Jim Carrey to “Dave Chappelle’s Block Party,” has hired Jack Black (“Nacho Libre”) to star in “Be Kind Rewind.”
In the offbeat comedy, Black will play a junkyard worker whose plans to sabotage a power plant that he believes is melting his brain result in all of the videotapes being erased in a store managed by his best friend. The only customer of the failing store is an old woman who’s losing her grasp on reality. She doesn’t notice that the two guys have put themselves in amateur videos that they claim are genuine copies of favorites such as “Back to the Future,” “The Lion King” and “Rush Hour.”
When the woman shares the tapes with friends, the two guys become neighborhood stars with customers anxious to see them in other video adventures.
– Teen favorite Camilla Belle, who enjoyed a hit with the fright-film remake “When a Stranger Calls,” will face plenty of man-eating creatures during “10,000 B.C.,” an action-adventure epic set in a time when mankind battled saber-tooth tigers and prehistoric predators.
Steven Strait (“Sky High”) stars as a young warrior out to overthrow an evil warlord and save the woman he loves in this fantasy epic, being directed by Roland Emmerich (“Independence Day”) and shot in New Zealand.