Today marks the 20th birthday of Antz - the film that kicked off the world of Dreamworks, the company that took on the big boys at Disney via the success of its Shrek series.
Antz (along with the film The Prince of Egypt) was intended to be a marked contrast to the conventional Disney cartoon. For a start, it had a PG rating (back when you had to really earn your PG for an animated film), was full of violence and adult subject matter, and was markedly more adult than general audiences were used to.
Advert
Plus, it's no coincidence that Antz came out around the same time Pixar's U-rated film, A Bug's Life did.
Antz was of course the 'edgier' bug cartoon of 1998, preceding the Disney film's release by about six weeks.
Unfortunately for Dreamworks, A Bug's Life ultimately out-grossed Antz by $162 million to $90m, while the very expensive Prince Of Egypt slowly crawled to $100m domestic. Regardless, the first shot was fired.
The film had an impressive voice cast, including Sharon Stone, Jennifer Lopez, Sylvester Stallone, Christopher Walken, Dan Aykroyd, Anne Bancroft, Danny Glover and Gene Hackman - many of whom he had worked with in the past.
Advert
Though it's now 20 years old, the film was pretty cutting edge back in 1998.
Using over 166 Silicon Graphics desktop systems and 270 Silicon Graphics servers, a total of 160 people worked together to create the second-ever completely computer-generated full-length feature film - forgetting the magic of today's amazing CGI, this was amazing for us kids of the 90s.
In fact, many of the ants had facial features to match their voice actors - which was also cutting edge at the time.
There are some pretty impressive facts behind the film - there are 119,592 frames in the film and the entire movie was rendered approximately 15 times during production. Roughly 33 meters of approved animation were produced per week and around 275,000 hours per week was spent on rendering - wow, talk about overtime.
The average size of individual frames rendered was 6MB and the total number of Silicon Graphics processors used for rendering was 700. However, it would've taken 54 years, 222 days, 15 minutes and 36 seconds, exactly, if the company rendered the film on one processor.
Advert
Yeah, that's a long list of facts and figures - but they're pretty impressive, no?
In fact, the film took up an impressive 3.2 TB of storage and 75,000 frames were kept online at any given time. Just think about how many photos it takes to max out your phone memory for comparison. Yeesh.
Antz may not have beaten Disney at its own game, but it kicked off the Dreamworks we know and love today. Plus it brought us the entire Shrek series so we've got to love them for that.
Featured Image Credit: PATopics: Film, Entertainment, TV and Film