The Ant Bully

Lucas Nickle is a ten-year-old boy who has recently moved to a new town, where he has made no friends and is regularly tormented by a neighborhood bully named Steve. His parents are distracted, and his older sister Tiffany has little patience for him. Unable to strike back at Steve, Lucas takes out his frustration on the anthill in his yard, stomping on the mounds and their inhabitants. The ants, who live in an organized society, decide they have had enough: they administer a magic elixir that shrinks Lucas to their size and put him on trial for what he has done to their colony. His sentence is to live among them and learn their ways, with his freedom depending on whether he can fit into their community.

The Ant Bully is an animated family adventure directed by John A. Davis, whose previous feature was Jimmy Neutron: Boy Genius (2001). Davis wrote the screenplay with John Nickle and also produced alongside Tom Hanks and Gary Goetzman. The voice cast includes Zach Tyler Eisen as Lucas, with Julia Roberts, Meryl Streep, Nicolas Cage, Paul Giamatti and Bruce Campbell among the credited performers.

Released in 2006, the film runs 89 minutes and was made for about 50 million USD, earning roughly 55 million USD worldwide. On IMDb it holds a rating of 5.8/10 from about 44,000 votes, and on TMDB it sits at 5.8/10 from around 1,500 votes. The film critics' rating is 6.3/10 from 114 reviews, somewhat higher than the audience scores.