Am I the only one who's simply sick to death of movies about ants? I’ve been fascinated by ants since playing Maxis’s SimAnt in the mid-nineties (I even read the science sidebars in the manual), but what makes them interesting to me is the very fact that they’re SO inhuman. No, I haven’t seen The Ant Bully and I probably won’t. I didn’t see Antz either. I watched the beginning of A Bug’s Life on TV a few weeks ago until I got sick of it. Just the promotional information makes it clear that all three of these movies make huge errors in regards to ant biology. If any moviemaker who might be reading this has the idea of making a movie about ants, put your face up against the screen and pay close attention to the following sentence: THERE IS NO SUCH THING AS AN ANT GIRLFRIEND. Period. I don’t care if the conventional wisdom is that kids movies need a love interest; it is completely antithetical to what ants are. Almost all ants- including workers, soldiers, nurses, and any other with a practical non-reproductive function- are sterile females. Winged ants are the only ones capable of mating. The best human analog for a male ant would be a lazy fop who gives nothing to the community, cares only about sex, and dies shortly after mating, since none of them live more than a few weeks. The females who survive and mate successfully become queens and attempt to form new colonies. Also, all ants in a colony are the queen’s children, so any attempt at mating within a colony would be inbreeding. Any meaningful romantic relationship between ants is every bit as absurd as the idea of male cows with udders, yet for some reason the former is acceptable while the latter is repulsive. And the idea of the “common worker ant in love with the queen’s daughter,” as A Bug’s Life had it, is doubly ridiculous. It’s typical romance clichés that simply don’t translate to the ant world.

While the “ant girlfriend” bit is the most grating aspect to me, the broader point is that it’s almost impossible to ascribe human emotions to ants, because they simply do not have any sort of emotion. Perhaps one could do a satire about forced conformity based on ants, but such a movie would likely end up having one ant who is bold enough to be an individual and go against the norm, which is completely antithetical to what ants are. The best bet might be to have a number of different colonies, and have each colony have a personality- maybe one actor could voice all of the ants in a given colony. The parts in Ant Bully about everything being “a team effort” are promising, but the ants still seem like individuals. Maybe I’m being too demanding. Maybe I should just grin and try to enjoy it. Whenever I think that, though, I remember your comments on Finding Nemo. Yeah, maybe they look like real animals, but they don’t act like them. They act like humans in animal suits. I have that problem with the majority of talking animal movies, like 101 Dalmatians, but usually I can get over it. With something as alien as ants, it’s just too much of a stretch for me to accept.