Tom Hanks is a busy guy! Not only is he still maintaining an active acting schedule, but he’s also producing and apparently likes doing voice acting as well. Hanks has apparently just signed on to do voice work in “The Ant Bully” (he’s also a producer on the project… so I guess they didn’t have to twist his arm too much). A film based on the book of the same title.
The good folks over at Ananova give us this:
The film, based on the book of the same name, tells the story of a boy who floods an ant colony with his water pistol. The boy then gets magically shrunk down to ant size and made to do hard labour in their world reports The Sun online.
Hmmm… I actually think this sounds really interesting. Yeah, sign me up. The rest of the voice cast isn’t too shabby either. Nicolas Cage, Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Lily Tomlin and Paul Giamatti are all also signed up to lend their voices to the film. This could be the first non-pixar animated film I’m looking forward to in a while.
For me, it doesn’t matter WHO does the voice acting for animated feature films. The best voices, for realism to the character, tend to be voices you can’t put to the face of the actor/actress. I didn’t know annoyance, Ben Stiller was in Madagascar, in the trailor…until his name was stated.
I must add, the story sounds like a fun watch. Hanks has alwasy had a hand in voice acting in childrens films, and does a great job doing so. I look forward to seeing “The Ant Bully”.
Nicholas Cage, you say? Well, thank god this is an ANIMATED film. I cannot stand to look at the cage when he’s flopping around and moving his mouth…..no? wait…..oh yeah, that’s ACTING. Sorry, Nick.
I stopped caring who did the voices in an animated film sometime shorty after Aladdin. Far too often now big voices are used to compensate for bad storytelling. Tell a story well and it doesn’t make much of a difference who tells it.