After the great success of Toy Story, Pixar was anxious to prove that it wasn’t a one picture fluke.  From music to cinema, there are plenty of one hit wonders and the studio understandably didn’t want to be come another member of that club.  Also raising the stakes was that the animation landscape had changed.  In addition to the still popular traditional Disney animation, another challenger had arrived to the scene.  A new studio called DreamWorks was formed by the entertainment power trio of Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and the most important, Jeffrey Katzenberg.  Katzenberg was a one-time Disney chairman who had left the studio in very acrimonious circumstances and after his departure  he became the man responsible for running DreamWorks animation.  During his tenure, his studio eventually became the greatest threat to Disney, highlighted by its very popular Shrek series.  They also announced that their first animated picture would be released the same year as Pixar’s second feature, and it would be covering a similar subject.

This was the challenge that Pixar was facing.  So after three years after the great success of a story about the magic of toys coming alive, the studio decided to do a film about bugs.  A bugs movie!  As much as I enjoyed toys as a child, I had the opposite reaction with bugs.  Sure, bumble bees and ladybugs are cute, but they get canceled out by mosquitoes, spiders, wasps, fleas, and an assortment of other unpleasant multi-legged insects.  To make a film about bugs would be a challenge, but Pixar was confident they would be up to the task. 

The first thing that Pixar had to do was to make the bugs in this movie appealing and interesting.  They decided to focus the main story on a group of ants who’s main task was to store food for the winter not only for themselves but also for the grasshoppers.  The decision to animate a majority of the ants in a light blue color instead of black or red, immediately made them more lovable.  They become more cartoonish and with the capabilities of the computer animation, more personable and cute.  The ants also have very distinct personalities.  Flick, the main character in the story, is creative, adventuresome, and eccentric.  Princess Atta, the heir to the crown of the colony, is hesitant, conscientious, and with an aura of class of an English royal.  Princess Dot, a young ant, is precocious, curious, and very cute.  I was immediately won over by those three characters and it’s a great credit to the animators for pulling this off.  

The main antagonists of the ants are the grasshoppers, who in contrast are frightening and menacing.  They are lead by an intimidating leader called Hopper, who runs his troop as a dictatorship.  He’s so evil that he’s not afraid to threaten children or even murdering a couple of grasshoppers who challenge his leadership.  Very dark stuff.  This is what the ants are up against and despite having an advantage in numbers, quiver whenever they appear. When the food being stored for Hopper and his gang is destroyed, the gang demands the ants to sacrifice their own food to appease them.  

The cause of this catastrophe came from an invention created by Flick that accidentally leads a chain of events that destroys the food supply.  He is banished from the colony, with the task of recruiting a crew of bugs that would protect them from the grasshoppers who’ll arrive later in the fall to take the food.  Flick who is looked upon as an outsider by his fellow ants, sees this as an opportunity to redeem himself.  He stumbles into a group of bugs who appear to be the protectors he’s looking for only to later discover they are circus performers.  Despite this setback, the bugs agree to pretend to be the protectors as they arrive to the ant colony.   Thanks to Flick’s creativity, they devise a plan to build a fake bird to capitalize on the greatest fear of the grasshoppers and scare them away from the food.

A Bug’s Life does a great job in creating a whole new environment that is populated with bugs. I really enjoyed the creation of a city full of human characteristics done in a insect world.  From the bugs hanging out at bars eating garbage to the paper trash serving as buildings its very creative.  Randy Newman is great again in creating a musical score that more than matches Toy Story’s and the animation is terrific  .I also think the voices of the ants are very well done by Dave Foley and Julia Louis Dreyfus with a special mention to Kevin Spacey who’s performance creates Hopper into one of the best villains in a Pixar film.  

However the supporting characters are a mixed bag.  While I enjoyed Phyllis Diller’s animated vocal as the queen of the ant colony, the rest of characters  leave a lot to be desired.  Mott the assistant to Hopper is nauseating every time he speaks, Heimlich the caterpillar is tiresome as he tells anybody he encounters that he wishes to be a caterpillar, and the majority of the circus bugs cast were pretty forgettable.  Denis Leary as the ladybug was memorable but even he is generally wasted, as his voice for the Ice Age films was better utilized.  If it weren’t for the well constructed character arcs for the ants and Hopper, this would’ve been a greater weakness.

A Bug’s Life was a great success.  It earned more than $360 million in the box office, which more than doubled the Antz gross of $171.8 million.  In some ways the success of this film was just as important to Pixar as Toy Story.  The film proved that the studio could make an animated feature that could entertain children and adults regardless of story.  However, despite this, the film has been overshadowed by Pixar’s subsequent releases.  Even at Disney World, the Bug’s Life 3D show at the Animal Kingdom is one of the least popular attractions at the park.  It’s a shame that a film that beautifully shows that creativity can be used to overcome obstacles, a community is at its strongest when it works together, and that there’s more to a character than what meets the eye is so easily forgotten.  If nothing else, a film that can make me emphatic about a group of ants and insects that I previously detested  is in itself a major accomplishment..