Disney by numbers

Rating: 4/10 (26 June 2020)

This was a massive disappointment. I saw "Toy Story" long after it came out, when the whole computer animation hype was long since old hat, but still loved it at once. I really enjoyed "The Incredibles" and thought "Ratatouille", "WALL-E", "Up" and "Inside Out" took animated film to a whole new level. But it turns out "A Bug's Life" is... a whole heap of steaming clichs.
Almost from the very beginning it felt as if they were sticking in just about every Hollywood/Disney trope aimed at the under-tens, many of them painfully inappropriate to the setting. Sorry, but ants don't have cute little child ants who set up a 'clubhouse' and save the world when the adults are busy giving up; ants have squishy larvae. Grasshoppers don't have mothers or little brothers. Worker ants don't have romantic moments with 'princesses', because worker ants are FEMALE. (And seriously, if you were going to design an ant-powered flying machine, why would you power it with child ants, instead of the strongest team in the colony? On the other hand, if it was originally designed for adult ants, how would the little ones even be able to get the wings to move?)
And then of course we've got the whole 'misunderstood loner whose brilliant ideas always go embarrassingly wrong' scenario, which I also found so clichd and obvious as to be almost painful. And 'the power of family/friendship can overcome everything' and 'you just need to believe in yourself'... it's practically a checkbox list of standard tropes, and while the same messages appear in many, many good films (there's a reason why they're standard), here I rapidly ended up with the feeling that it was Disney product being done by numbers. Watching "A Bug's Life" versus "Toy Story" is like watching "Flushed Away" versus "Chicken Run"; the magic isn't there and it's gone corporate.
It was also very noticeable that for all the gnashing mouthparts and serrated limbs, the worst anyone gets threatened with in the script is getting 'stomped' or 'squished', which doesn't really match up to the visuals and again is rather obviously by-the-book for small children. The hero's Grand Plan is discarded (for no very clear reason -- why would the discovery of his deception about the circus prevent the planned 'scare-crow' tactic from working?) and then heroically launched again at the last minute and then after a prolonged show fails anyway. In another context that might have come across as stunning originality, but by that point it just struck me as being an excuse for this film to have its cake and eat it; for him to be a Great Inventor, but also demonstrate that true strength comes from love and the power of unity and standing up to your fears, blah blah blah.
As a result the finale is incredibly prolonged -- like much of the rest of the film. The 'botched circus' scene at the beginning in particular felt as if it lasted far too long, partly I think because it was presumably supposed to be funny, and that's not my type of humour at all. (But then, thinking about it, that goes for quite a lot of the would-be-funny parts of this film.)
I'm afraid I found "A Bug's Life" actively annoying from quite early on, and I'm not quite sure in all justice why. It felt cynically manipulative and shallow, as if you could see all the cogs turning and buttons being pushed, and being stuffed with bad biology didn't help. (Heinrich the fat caterpillar pupates and turns into... a fat caterpillar with wings?) I felt zero chemistry where the characters were concerned. Yes, it's a U-rated children's film that was never aimed at the likes of me in the first place, but a good children's film ought to work for adults too.
After all, I've seen plenty of pictures that commit the 'sins' mentioned above, and loved them. "Chicken Run", for instance, features hens with teeth acting in a highly anthropomorphic way, and it even has an artificial flapping bird... but that production struck me as simply brilliant. And compared to a lot of children's films, "A Bug's Life" does more or less show its villain being killed and eaten, whereas a lot of classic Hollywood movies go to lengths to indicate that if the villain dies, that's absolutely not the hero's responsibility in any way.
I think perhaps what irked me about it was that there didn't seem to be any greater depth -- any references that adults could be expected to get over and above the target audience. The humour remains on the level of "Francis is a male 'lady'bird... haw, haw haw", the romance is school-gate stuff, and the attempts at emotional manipulation aren't exactly sophisticated. It was like being subjected to a lecturer who persists in talking to a mixed audience as if they were all six-year-olds.