Production
Antz was released a little more than a month before Pixar's A Bug's Life, which was also a computer-animated film about ants.
Jeffrey Katzenberg left Disney in 1994 to form DreamWorks. According to Katzenberg, the idea for Antz came from a 1991 story pitch by Tim Johnson that was related to Katzenberg, Despite the fact that Disney had been working on developing an ant movie since 1988. Pixar head John Lasseter pitched A Bug's Life the day Katzenberg left Disney in August 1994, and said he felt "betrayed" when he learned Antz was scheduled for release before A Bug's Life. According to Lasseter and Steve Jobs, Katzenberg offered to stop development of Antz if Disney moved the release date of A Bug's Life, which was coming out opposite DreamWorks' The Prince of Egypt. Pixar refused, resulting in the release of the film being moved up from March 1999 to October 1998 in response. Even though A Bug's Life was the first to be pitched, Antz was finished and released first.
Antz was released to DVD on March 23, 1999, becoming the first CGI animated film to be available on the format.
Read more about this topic: Antz
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“The heart of man ever finds a constant succession of passions, so that the destroying and pulling down of one proves generally to be nothing else but the production and the setting up of another.”
—François, Duc De La Rochefoucauld (1613–1680)
“The repossession by women of our bodies will bring far more essential change to human society than the seizing of the means of production by workers.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)