A Bug’s Life

Not the most essential of the Pixar films for me, but proof that Pixar has provided smart and funny films that someone will love. While I find A Bug’s Life to be good but not great, I know people who love this one the most. And that is what makes Pixar the towering giant for our current animated landscape.

The story is a play off of Aesop’s fable about the ant and the grasshopper, expanding times a hundred. Instead of a singular ant and grasshopper, we have an entire colonies of each. All of the ants look like each other, but slightly different enough to tell who is who. The same can be said of the grasshoppers. This is a testament to the love, time and care put into the project by the animators. But as I was originally saying, the story concerns the ants, led by a Queen (Phyllis Diller) and her two princesses (Julia Louis-Dreyfuss, Hayden Panettiere), who must prepare an offering to the grasshoppers, led by Hopper (Kevin Spacey). Of course there must be a hero, and our everyman-cum-hero is Flik (Dave Foley), the smartest ant in the colony. He’s more prone to inventing wildly imaginative gadgets than doing things proper. And in a grand tradition dating back towards Hercules, Flik must go out into the world and prove his worth by completing a task. This task is to find warriors to fight for the ant colony. And the “warriors” that he finds have always been my favorite thing about the film. the rag-tag group of circus performers are charming, hilarious and adorable. I never knew I could want to hug a caterpillar so much.

It ends exactly how you think it would end, but the animation, humor and characters bring more heart and originality to the story than the story beats. Nothing wrong with that. This is an archetypal storyline, and deviation from the formula would put you into a different movie entirely. There’s room for unique characters and humor in these stories though. That’s how you make them special.

And since this is a Pixar film I must talk more about the gloriously rendered images. The tree at the beginning of the film looks like a real tree! The rain drops that fall on the ant hill might as well have been a blitzkrieg. The circus routines are zany and appropriately kid-friendly. The City looks like Manhattan made out of old soup cans, pieces of trash and other odds-and-ends. Beautiful.

But emotionally this is, for me, not as gripping as the toys of Toy Story, the monsters of Monsters, Inc., the nuclear family of The Incredibles, or the Chaplain-esque robot love story of Wall-E. I found them funny and likable, I loved the animation, but I just didn’t connect with this as I did with the others.