Ant-iseptic

Rating: 5/10 (29 June 2020)

I've always viewed "A Bugs Life" as the Pixar film that got away, the one that nobody loves like "Toy Story", "Finding Nemo" or even "Cars", but a slight rejig of the alphabetical order on Disney Plus pushed it up to being the next film on my list to watch. I remain underwhelmed.
Flick (Dave Foley) is an ant, whose colony pays protection food to a group of violent grasshoppers at the start of the summer. When he accidentally destroys the offering, he leaves the village to look for a group of tough bugs to come and protect the colony from the grasshoppers and their monstrous leader Hopper (Kevin Spacey). Triumphantly returning with who he believes are just the creatures for the job, he's distraught when they reveal to him that they are, in fact, a circus troupe.
So I really didn't enjoy "A Bugs Life". I don't want to take away anything from the monumental effort that goes into making any form of animated film, but the film does look pretty dated now. The tree and plant effects are pretty convincing still but the characters, particularly facially have a dull plastic-ness to them. There's a "dead behind the eyes" look to them that fortunately Pixar managed to overcome pretty quickly going forward from here.
That's not the only problem though. The storyline is pedestrian and familiar given it's a reworking of "Seven Samurai" or perhaps more closely "Three Amigos", and the script lacking in genuine moments of humour. There's a dissonance between the world that the Ants inhabit - essentially, just an empty hole in the ground, and the trash reconfigured to reflect the human world that the rest of the insects have, with bars, restaurants and circuses.
I don't want to go overboard with my criticism, there's no one area so spectacularly awful as to undermine the film, it's just that the experience of the film is consistently underwhelming.