Arnie & Barney review – dimwit ant double-act from Maya the Bee are on mission to entertain

In 1912 in Germany, antisemitic writer Waldemar Bonsels published The Adventures of Maya the Bee, which later became a 1970s anime series in Japan called Maya the Honey Bee, and was later dubbed into English a couple of times, including for kids TV channel Nickelodeon in the 1990s and a bunch of films between 2014 and 2021. Still with us? Recurring characters from the show include Arnie and Barney, a pair of dimwit ants, and now, at long last, they have their own spin-off movie.

The film opens very much in media res, with a young female bee flying through outer space clutching a small pig and droplet of water the size of her head. She’s being pursued aggressively by a handful of wasp-type creatures and a narrator solemnly intones: “Sometimes the most unlikely heroes … become legends.” The bee then stops next to a couple of red ants and asks what they’re doing. They are the narrators, they explain, but this his is all soon revealed as fantasy – the pair of ants are telling a story to a larger platoon of ants. Some exposition follows about the ants’ mission: to find fresh water.

This is fine as far as it goes, perhaps, but what a précis can’t convey is quite how staggeringly ugly and uninteresting the whole endeavour is. It starts with the character design: it’s hard to imagine any but the most aesthetically starved children embracing this ant pair. Boy are they a chore to spend time with, both visually and in terms of the lacklustre script. Even if you are struggling for entertainment options you might want to do the kids a favour and skip this one.