4) Antz
Disney’s biggest animation rival since 1998 has been DreamWorks, whose animation studios released their first feature that year, an unlikely project featuring a lead ant character voiced by Woody Allen. The film also featured a philosophical examination and darker and heavier images and themes that aren’t even associated with animated movies now, let alone in the earliest days of computer animated features. In fact, Toy Story writer Andrew Stanton ended up co-directing A Bug’s Life, a computer animated feature depicting the story of ants, which was released only two months after Antz.
It’s not uncommon for two very similar movies to be made at the same time, but the details about how these projects came to be pursued at their respective studios are curious. Jeffrey Katzenberg was an executive at Disney until he and CEO Michael Eisner fell out, prompting Katzenberg to head up the DreamWorks animation department. It seems too much of a coincidence for Katzenberg to then independently oversee work on an animated movie about an ant when that was precisely what had already been pitched over at Disney. There has to be some overlap, and Disney certainly felt as though their idea was stolen, but Katzenberg denies everything, naturally. If this were The Social Network, though, Katzenberg is Mark Zuckerberg and Eisner and Steve Jobs are the Winklevi. Antz is a vastly superior movie, and was the first to plant its flag. Take that, Mickey.
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