How else could something so alarmingly unoriginal be so much fun? The Ant Bully is the most déja vu-inducing animated movie since The Wild, but unlike that Madagascar redux, The Ant Bully isn't half bad. Tired of being picked on by the neighborhood bully, Lucas (Zach Tyler) takes out his frustration on the ants living in his lawn, until colony shaman Zoc (Nicolas Cage) brews a potion that brings "The Destroyer" — as the ants fearfully refer to Lucas — down to their size.

Sure, it sounds like another Honey, I Shrunk the Kids sequel, and both Pixar and DreamWorks have tackled animated-ant stories before (A Bug's Life and Antz, respectively). Even the exterminator-as-villain device surfaced just two months back in Over the Hedge (with each movie casting a different Sideways co-star: Paul Giamatti here, Thomas Haden Church there).

But writer/director John A. Davis (Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius) is a wizard at transforming the most mundane setting — the front yard, for crying out loud — into another world.

That Star Wars comparison earlier wasn't an exaggeration. With its strange creatures and alien ways, the anthill feels like a foreign planet, and it's awesome to rediscover our place from their point of view. As producer Tom Hanks put it at that IMAX press screening: "You need to know how another culture works in order to interact with it."

That's the lesson of John Nickle's children's book. Unlike The Polar Express, which Hanks also produced, The Ant Bully bears little resemblance to the look or plot of the source material. (In Polar Express, Hanks performed virtually every voice; here he does none but helped bring Julia Roberts and Meryl Streep on board.)

Davis does his own thing, and he seems to love lessons, cramming the movie with as many as he can. It's exhausting, and it gets in the way of the story and the characters. Some personalities fluctuate wildly from scene to scene just so the movie can squeeze in one more eat-your-broccoli example for the kiddos. For a bully, Lucas isn't nearly sadistic enough.

At heart — which on ants is located, the movie teaches us, where their butts should be — The Ant Bully is just a great ride, but all that moralizing diminishes the fun of feeling ant-sized yourself and being immersed in Lucas's incredible adventures.

But seeing it in 3-D goes a long way to fix that. So consider me biased — or better yet, consider a drive to the nearest IMAX theater to experience The Ant Bully the same way yourself.

[as featured in The Miami Herald]