Graphic excellence mounted on wafer thin plot.

Rating: 3/10 (24 April 1999)

The best children's stories in the literature have souls. By this, we mean they have significance and nourish the growing mind with inspiration, motivation, or teach something. The stories need not be seminal but should at least bring some value to the reader or audience. This is the case, for example, in Pinocchio, where a puppet loved life so much it wanted to be a real boy and by its goodness became one. In A Bug's Life, we find nothing even approximating a meaningful story. It is tragic because the producing studio, Pixar, has developed the finest graphic animation in the world today in character renderings.
That the studio limits itself to children's audiences is their choice and certainly, although more limited than a crossover or a family market the child market still yields enough box office to keep the doors open. Why they have chosen to produce superficial stories, however, so flat and wafer thin they will not have legs for the future, is a mystery.
We hope that at some point this remarkably talented group of animators will somehow mature into a shop with a strong story group that can manage to locate a good source of literature to mount with their beautiful artistry. Indeed, no American animation producer has had strong story resources or even analytical recognition since the death of Walt Disney in 1966.