Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants

Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants (French: Minuscule : La Vallée des fourmis perdues) is a French-Belgian live action animated film, co-written and directed by Hélène Giraud and Thomas Szabo. This film is a sound film with a synchronized soundtrack featuring music and sound effects and with little to no spoken dialogue.[4] The film shares the same creative universe as the Minuscule series also created by Hélène Giraud and Thomas Szabo. It won the César Award for Best Animated Feature Film at the 40th César Awards. A sequel, Minuscule: Mandibles from Far Away[5], was released on January 30, 2019.

Minuscule: Valley of the Lost Ants
Film poster
Directed by
  • Hélène Giraud
  • Thomas Szabo
Produced byPhilippe Delarue
Written by
  • Hélène Giraud
  • Thomas Szabo
Music byHervé Lavandier
Production
company
Distributed byLe Pacte
Release date
  • 17 November 2013 (2013-11-17) (Tallinn)
  • 26 February 2014 (2014-02-26) (Belgium)
  • 29 January 2014 (2014-01-29) (France)
Running time
89 minutes[1]
Country
  • France
  • Belgium
Budget€10.2 million[2]
Box office$22.8 million[3]

Plot

A newly hatched ladybug is bullied by group of flies and attempts to fly away, but the flies chase after it. The ladybug crashes and breaks off a wing. Unable to locate its family, the ladybug shelters in a tin for the night. The tin is full of sugar cubes, part of an abandoned picnic. In the morning, various bugs are carrying off the spoils of the picnic. A foraging patrol of black ants find the sugar and start carrying off the tin, with the ladybug still inside, to their nest. The ants encounter a patrol of red ants and give them a sugar cube as a peace offering, but the red ants pursue them for the rest of the sugar. The black ants escape by sliding down an embankment and into a stream on the tin. The ladybug falls overboard and the ants rescue it from becoming a hungry fish's lunch. The red ants pursue them down stream in a soda can. They all go over a waterfall and the tin washes up on the shore down stream. The black ants pick up the sugar cubes and start hauling them back to their nest.

On the journey the ladybug becomes friends with the patrol's leader. The ladybug sees some other flying ladybugs, but unable to fly with one wing, remains with the ants. They arrive at the nest and the patrol's leader invites the ladybug to join the colony, where they present their hoard of sugar to the queen. At night, the ladybug dreams of flying with its family, wakes up and tests its wings. The wing is regrowing slowly but it still can't fly.

The red ants arrive with a massive army and besiege the black ant's nest and bombard it using slingshots. The black ants set off a firework which incinerates some red ants but they don't have any more matches to light the rest. The ladybug remembers that there was a box of matches at the picnic, and now able to fly, sets off to retrieve them.

The ladybug find the matchbox but is not strong enough to fly back with it. A spider runs off with the matchbox and takes it to its house in a drain, which the ladybug's parents warned it about. The ladybug follows anyway and sneaks into the house. A frog tries to grab the ladybug with its tongue through a window, but ladybug fights back and the house topples onto the frog. After a nights rest, and a grape for breakfast, the ladybug is feeling better. It persuades the spider to let it have the matches and sets out with them for the nest. The ladybug stops on the way to save another ladybug from the flies. They kiss before the ladybug resumes its mission.

The ladybug arrives at the nest which has been half demolished. The black ants fire off their remaining fireworks incinerating some of the red ants and starting a bushfire that drives the rest away. A water-bombing plane arrives and extinguishes the fire, saving the black ants, but flattening their nest. They emerge from the basement and begin rebuilding. The ladybug raises a family with its lover. Later it returns to the ant nest and sits with its old friend watching the sunset.

Accolades
gollark: I mean, kind of.
gollark: You can *do* mutability...
gollark: Haskell *does* have ST, too.
gollark: RedBlobGames has a cool tutorial on A* pathfinding.
gollark: Graphs as in edges/vertices, right?

References
  1. "MINUSCULE: VALLEY OF THE LOST ANTS (U)". British Board of Film Classification. 21 April 2016. Retrieved 21 April 2016.
  2. "Minuscule - La vallée des fourmis perdues". JP's Box-Office.
  3. "Minuscule - La vallée des fourmis perdues (Minuscule, Valley of the Lost Ants)". Box Office Mojo.
  4. http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/review/minuscule-valley-lost-ants-film-675599
  5. "Minuscule 2 - Les Mandibules du bout du monde".
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