Movie Mondays: A Bugs Life

Where do you go after Toy Story? Before Toy Story, Pixar was a relatively unknown studio on the cusp of bankruptcy, post Toy Story they were suddenly thrust into the mainstream spotlight. Suddenly, everyone had heard of Pixar. Toy Story defied expectations and had become a smash hit with both audiences and critics. To give you an example of how big Toy Story was, when the first Buzz Lightyear toy came out the same year to promote the film there ended up being a shortage of them because they didn’t make enough to meet demand. Everyone loved Toy Story. So what next?

How do you top a success like that? I suppose you really can’t but you could argue that the best way to do so would be to go bigger, bigger characters, bigger worlds, bigger action. Pixar’s solution, was to do the exact opposite. Instead of going bigger, they went smaller by making the next movie about insects. In a strange way it makes sense, the last movie was about small toys so, why not go even smaller with the smallest creature’s there are?

And so we have A Bugs Life. This movie came out around three years after the Toy Story, I was only 3 when Toy Story came out, so I would have been 6 when A Bugs Life released. By this point I was deep into my Disney fandom thanks to the renaissance and, since I had watched Toy Story a lot, I was excited for A Bugs Life. I remember watching this film a lot as a kid, I even owned some talking Hopper and Flik toys and I even liked the videogame. But that was 23 years ago, sweet Jesus do I feel old, and I haven’t seen this film in a very long time. Does it still hold up?

But before we talk about the film, I need to address the pachyderm in the office. Remember that Jeffrey Katsenberg cat I mentioned last time? Well by the time of Toy Story’s release he had left Disney animation due to a feud with then Disney CEO, Michael Eisner. After leaving Disney he would later go on to become a founding member of Dreamworks and would lead the Dreamworks animation department in an effort to compete with the House of Mouse. During this time, Katsenberg bought out PDI, another computer animation company. And what was the first computer animated film Dreamworks made? Antz, another CG movie about insects that bore some striking plot similarities to what Pixar was doing at the time.

When Pixar found out about this, they were furious. John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton the directors of A Bugs Life were especially upset because they had gone to Katsenberg for help with A Bugs Life and felt betrayed that Katsenberg had basically stolen their idea to get back at Disney. Though like most stories of this nature there are two sides, Katsenberg has stated that the idea for Antz was inspired by a pitch he was given long before Toy Story and denies that he stole Pixar’s idea. We will never really know what happened but both films would release at around the same time to good critical reviews and box office results, so I guess everyone walked out of it ok.

So what is A Bugs Life about? Well in terms of plot, it’s a take on the classic Aesop Fable, The Grasshopper and the Ants. The film is about a colony of ants working to gather food for the winter. But it’s not food for them. Instead, they’re gathering food for a group of Grasshoppers lead by a particularly angry bug named Hopper. The Grasshoppers in this story are kind of like a biker gang running a protection racket, the ants pick the food for the grasshoppers and the grasshoppers “protect” the ants from other bugs that would take advantage of them.

Our main hero is an ant named Flik. Flik doesn’t really fit in with the other ants, he wants to help by coming up with new ideas and inventions to help with production, but they never work out. He's also got a thing for the princess of the ants, Princess Atta, but she and the rest of the colony don’t take him that seriously, aside from Atta’s little sister Dot. When one of Fliks inventions causes the food offering to fall into the water, the grasshoppers demand double the food when they return at the end of the summer.

Flik then comes up with an idea to get rid of the grasshoppers once and for all, get some bigger bugs from the city to come and defend them. So Flik goes to the city to gather some tough warrior bugs but accidentally mistakes some circus bugs for warriors and hires them instead. The circus bugs come with thinking they’re being hired for a big performance. When Flik finds out he goofed up he now has to hide his screw up while coming up with a new plan for dealing with the grasshoppers.

The story for A Bug Life is, ok. There's nothing ostensibly wrong with it, it’s easy enough to follow, its paced well and the characters are likable. The problem is that there isn’t a lot going on under the hood. You look at Toy Story and Pixar movies released after Bugs Life and they have a little more going on in terms of underlying themes. A Bugs life by comparison is a much simpler film. Is there anything wrong with that? Not at all, in fact one of the reasons I liked it as a kid was because of its simplicity. There's nothing wrong with a simple story as long as it’s told A Bugs Life is told well for the most part.

My only real complaint is that it’s a bit too predictable and cliched, especially in the third act. You know exactly what I'm referring to, when everyone finds out about the lie and they reject the main character so the film can have the characters mope around until they decide to come back and continue the fight. I really hate this trope, it just drags the movie to a halt and does little but pad out the run out the runtime. But aside from that the story is, as I said, ok. It's just a simple little underdog story and that’s perfectly fine.

Now an ok story can be elevated with a strong cast of characters. Look at Lord of the Rings for example, the plot is just people walking to a volcano and yet the characters are some of the most beloved in all of fiction. So how are the characters in A Bugs Life. Well like the plot they’re decent enough but lack the depth of the characters in Toy Story. They don’t have much going for them beyond their surface level traits and their development is straight forward to a fault. You know where they’re gonna end up the minute you see them.

I think the main problem with A Bugs Life’s cast is that there’s just too many of them. Toy Story had a large cast as well, but the focus was on Buzz and Woody which lead to the two being a lot more complex as a result. A Bugs Life doesn’t have that same focus which leads to the characters being a lot simpler. Now that’s not to say the characters are unlikable because they aren’t. If anything I ended up liking most of the cast. Flik is a likable enough protagonist that’s easy to root for, Atta is a decent love interest who goes through her own arc of dealing with the responsibilities of leadership and Hopper makes for an effective antagonist that you want to see get beaten.

However, the highlight of the cast is easily the circus bugs.There's Francis a male ladybug who keeps being mistaken for a girl; boy Twitter is not going to like that. Anyway, there’s also Slim a stick insect who keeps being cast as a prop, Tuck and Roll are a pair of termites who no one can understand, Manny the mantis magician who can’t see two feet in front of him and Heimlich the caterpillar who is very, very fat, again Twitter is not going to take that very well. The circus bugs are the highlight of the movie because they play into the films strengths. That being, the comedy.

While A Bugs Life might not be a complex movie, it is a very entertaining one. And really, isn’t that most important. A Bugs Life leans a lot more heavily on the comedy than a lot of other Pixar and a lot of it is very funny. There's a lot of great visual gags, one-liners, slapstick and while the characters are simple, their distinct personalities they work of each other very well. This is a funny movie. I was engaged throughout the movie due to the strength of the comedy.

You know what helps with the comedy, the voice acting. A Bugs Life has an all-star cast of some very funny people. Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, David Hyde Pierce, Phyllis Diller, Denis Leary, Richard Kind, Jonathan Harris, Brad Garret, Bonnie Hunt, and even Madeline Kahn in one of her last film roles. And there’s the returning John Ratsenberg as P.T Flea the circus ringleader. These are all very funny people and they give each character a ton of energy. Really the only actor who isn’t funny is Kevin Spacey as Hopper, but that’s by design since he’s portrayed with a cold menace since, you know, he’s a villain. Even the child actors do a good job in this, how rare is that. The voice acting is top-notch across the board, I don’t think there’s a bad performance in the entire film. A lot of these actors would later return and do voice work for other Pixar films.

But what of the animation I hear you cry. This is another one of the films highlights. It’s bright and colourful which should help please the kids, but it’s the creativity and scale of the visuals that impress the most. If you recall, in my Toy Story review I talked about my love of playing with perspectives. Of seeing familiar environments from a different viewpoint simply by changing the size and scope of it. A Bugs Life takes that idea, cranks it up to 11, rips off the dial and throws that dial into the ocean.

Because the characters are all insects, everything is huge. A simple cluster of berries is big enough to get stuck in, they can glide on a dandelion tuft, they build cities out of human trash and circuses use Casey jr. cookie boxes as their caravans, love the Dumbo reference there by the way. There are two parts of the movie that are good examples of the movies sense of scale. The aforementioned bug city segment, which is criminally brief, and the bird. The bird is the big action set piece next to the finale. The bird is portrayed as a big monster like Godzilla, but it looks like a regular bird. And yet it’s terrifying just for how big it is. It makes sense, the characters are insects and insects get eaten by birds, no wonder the bird is so terrifying in this movie. Also, this might be the only film to make baby birds legitimately frightening.

You could make the argument that the animation isn’t as revolutionary of as impressive as what was in Toy Story, and you wouldn’t be wrong. But that’s to be expected. Toy Story was the first film of it’s kind, of course the follow-up isn’t going to be as impressive. But while the animation might not be as impressive, it is a lot more consistent. While there were certain elements of Toy Story that didn’t really look right, like the humans and the dog, I didn’t notice anting in A Bugs Life that looked particularly bad. If anything I would argue the CG here has held up a lot better, though it did come out three years later so that should be expected.

So, how does A Bugs Life fare. I’m going to judge this movie on two fronts, as a standalone movie and as a follow up to Toy Story. As a standalone film, A Bugs Life is fine. The story and characters lack depth, but it makes up for that with good comedy, great voice acting and excellent animation. Even the music in the film by Randy Newman is quite excellent, though there are no songs this time around. How is it as a follow up to Toy Story, eh. It isn’t bad necessarily but compared to the depth that Toy Story has, not to mention how ground-breaking Toy Story was, it comes up a little short.

So can I recommend A Bugs Life? Yes, but it wouldn’t be the first Pixar movie I would go for. It is a decent family film that kids and adults will enjoy, but it doesn’t have the strong emotional core other Pixar movies have that make them such enduring classics. However, A Bugs Life does possess its own strengths that make it worth a viewing. Its strong comedy makes up for what it lacks in narrative. If you want a Pixar movie that’s more of a straight comedy with less emotionally heavy moments, this isn’t a bad one to go for.

I asked at the beginning, where do you go after Toy Story? There was no way Pixar were going to top themselves this quickly. Is it, perhaps, a little too harsh to compare this movie to its ground-breaking predecessor? Possibly, but that’s what happens when you’re the follow up to a genre defining film. A Bugs Life may not have topped Toy Story in terms of quality, but it did prove that Pixar was a dependable studio that wasn’t just a one trick pony. But they were still young and had so much more to give. Pixar had potential they had yet to fully tap into, but that was about to change. And we’ll see how next week when I look at the first Pixar sequel, Toy Story 2. Until next time, remember to stay safe and have fun.