Oh, that's Antz, isn't it? Disney's version makes their protagonist a hapless ant inventor who keeps trying to make labor go more quickly, except that nobody's interested, and he's clumsy and breaks things with his inventions, anyway. He also has his eye on the princess ant, played not by Sharon Stone, who was the princess ant in Antz, but by somebody else. Phyllis Diller is the tart-mouthed queen ant who's getting ready to pass on the egg-laying chores to her oldest daughter.

Trouble comes in the form of Kevin Spacey as Hopper, the head grasshopper of the swarm of grasshoppers that stop by each season to visit the ants and eat most of their food. It's protection food to make sure nothing bad happens to the colony. I think this is called extortion. Foley, because he's a bungler, screws up and loses the food offering, so the Hopper Bunch gets tough with the ants. Foley is tossed out, but not before vowing to find some warrior bugs to come back and get tough with the grasshoppers.  He mistakes a group of unemployed circus bugs for warriors (I forget what they'd been saying/doing to make him think this), leading the way for much comic mayhem as they believe in themselves and thus do anything. That's pretty much the moral; i.e. believe in yourself, etc.

This isn't to say I disliked the film, but like I said, I liked Antz better. It wasn't made by Disney and thus lacked the cuteness levels of all Disney films, regardless of the subject matter. However, standouts inlude Dennis Leary as a ladybug forever battling that "lady" part in his name, even though I don't normally like Leary, and Jonathan Harris as a praying mantis. Phyllis Diller is always good to hear, of course. But what puts it above Antz, and every other animated feature film to date, is the set of "outtakes" run at the end of the movie. By definition animation does not have "outtakes," meaning actor's flubs and props and animals running amok, so while the so-called outtakes here were made just as painstakingly as the real scenes, they come across exactly like their live-action counterparts. Insects burst into uncontrollable giggles, props fall, things are dropped, and bugs mess up their lines. They even include the clapper loader, video beep just before each cut, and split second of overexposed film in between. Beautiful, man.

And yes, I did get that this was an insect version of The Seven Samurai.