John A. Davis: Ant Bully’s Architect

By Elliot V. Kotek
(Moving Pictures Humor and Animation issue, Aug./Sept. 2006)

Warner Bros. has a long association with animated characters: Bugs, Daffy, Tweety, Yosemite Sam. The record-shattering box-office takes from animation giants Disney/Pixar and DreamWorks (Paramount) woke rival studios such as Sony, The Weinstein Company and, now, Warner Bros. into action. With Ant Bully, the WB has upped the, er, ant-e. Actually, this film is the ant-ithesis... That is, the film's ant-ihero... Sorry, I just can't help it. Maybe I should let the writer/director speak for himself:

Moving Pictures magazine: How did your journey begin?
John A. Davis: I remember being at an animation festival when I was a kid, and I saw some stop motion and I understood how they were making it. So I got my parents' home movie camera, started animating, got excited about it, and have been making movies ever since. By the time I went to high school I realized it takes money to make movies so I started a film club. I saw other clubs having bake sales and raising money to give to charity, and I thought, "What fools! They could be making movies!"

MPM: And Ant Bully?
John A. Davis: Right after Jimmy Neutron came out, in spring 2002, Tom Hanks sent me the book. His son, Truman Hanks, had brought it home from school; I think he was in kindergarten at the time. Tom was reading it to him one night and saw something in the book... We talked about it, and then he said, "Let's do it." I started writing the first draft a little over four years ago.

He was a fan of Neutron, so he thought I'd be a good match. It turns out we're both big fans of Ray Harryhausen and Star Trek, and this story really drew on my childhood infatuation with those fantasy Harryhausen films.

Once we had a script, we started talking about casting. Myself and Warner Bros. and [Tom Hanks's company] Playtone each put together our lists of favorite people and started talking about who we wanted to go to first. We went to Julia Roberts and she got attached, and then it felt like it was a chain reaction. Nic Cage came on board, then we got Meryl Streep, Paul Giamatti... I was pretty astounded. It was a little intimidating having to direct these people. I'm just a guy from Dallas.

MPM: How do you direct an animated voice performance?
John A. Davis: First, I explain...what the goals of the scene are. I have to paint a picture for them as usually there's nothing for them to look at; they're not on a set and not with other actors... Once they get comfortable I encourage them to go off, put the dialogue into their words or do whatever they want to do. When...recording one actor at a time, I have to write like crazy in the margins all the things they're saying, because then I have to go back into the script so that the next actor has the right words to respond to.

With Meryl [Streep], I explained what I was looking for in the queen character - that she was goddess, a kind of a deity, and I wanted her to have this serene maternal alien quality to her - so she affected her performance that way.

MPM: Are the traditional voice-over actors bitter at all that these name live-action folk can come in and take their roles?
John A. Davis: Yeah. But they know the drill going in; even on the first day of shooting, they'll say, "Oh, you're just going to replace me anyway." It depends on the role. Obviously, the studios like having names attached, but the bottom line is that they have to be right for the role - and Nic Cage and Julia [Roberts] were absolutely perfect for their roles, and Paul Giamatti was just fantastic. They were all great - Lily Tomlin, Bruce Campbell; all those guys did such a great job that I don't know who else I'd get to do them.

MPM: Did you buy an ant farm for your research?
John A. Davis: I never had an ant farm. But I started studying ants and what it is about them that's very cool that I hadn't seen before. I wanted to depict them like a little alien culture that we know nothing about; they have their own distinct civilization and little belief systems. And I started drawing parallels to Aboriginal culture...and there were some really interesting parallels, too. For one thing, the Aborigines have an almost supernatural ability to communicate over long distances; no one is really sure how they do it. It's sort of telepathic in a way, sort of how ants communicate over distances using odors and scent trails... I couldn't really go too deep into that for a kid's movie, but you can see it.

I did feel like a hypocrite at one point. When I was writing the script, we had a carpenter ant infestation at our house, and so we actually had to call the exterminator out. Literally, while I was typing away on the script - "Look at the wonderful world of ants; they're so wise, and look at their culture" - the exterminator was...killing hundreds of them.

MPM: But it probably taught you more empathy with the bully?
John A. Davis: Exactly, because at the beginning of the film, Lucas, the little boy, gets bullied by the neighborhood bully so he turns around and takes it out on the ants. You want to see Lucas is making the wrong decision but at the same time you don't lose sympathy for him, because what kid hasn't done that? He seems almost justified, but then he's struck down to their world and he can see, truly, what the ramifications of his actions are.

Then there are fun sequences, like when Lucas gets eaten by a frog and he lands in its belly and meets all these other past meals/bugs in there who are waiting to be digested. They all start having this conversation in this frog's belly, and each bug down there has a completely different, distinct personality: a crotchety fly, a glum glowworm and a really happy beetle who has no idea what position he's in. It was fun setting up such a dynamic scene and then watching the characters play off of each other.

MPM: What was the Oscar^TM experience like with Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius?
John A. Davis: It was amazing because it was the first feature film that I'd ever even worked on, and I ended up being writer, director and producer on it. It was an instant boot camp of learning how these things are made. And then to suddenly have a category open up and be actually nominated - it just felt like I was shot out of a cannon.

It's not just the nomination, it's getting to go through the whole experience of going to the parties, the luncheon, the big awards ceremony... There were a lot of moments where you just ask yourself, "How did all of this happen?"

MPM: With the distribution of Japanese anime films here, and the continual decline in the cost of associated technology, will we see more non-family-orientated animated film?
John A. Davis: Getting those films distributed here is a start. The thing that I hope to see happening, as the ability to make animation becomes less expensive, is to see different types of storytelling. Studios are more eager to take a chance on something that costs $20 million or less, whereas on something that costs $150 million they have to cast a big wide net and they're always going to tell a specific type of story.

Hayao Miyazaki is my all-time favorite animations director/producer - Princess Mononoke, Totoro, Spirited Away. He's phenomenally consistent in terms of his product.

MPM: Is it time for you to branch out from animation?
John A. Davis: My next film that I'm actually going to direct and write will be CG animation within a live action film... I'm adapting a very popular novel into a family movie. It'll still allow me to do animation, which I love.

I really love escapist entertainment, which is why I love fantasy and science fiction themes, and not just spaceships and robots. I want it to show me someplace I haven't seen before. I'd like to go and mine some of the great works of science fiction literature...which will hit both bases for me - they'll be emotionally satisfying and visually spectacular. -MPM