A Bug's Life

**A Bug's Life** is an American film that was released on November 20, 1998.

The film was written by Andrew Stanton, Donald McEnery and Bob Shaw, and directed by John Lasseter.

## Plot

Ant Island is a colony of ants led by the Queen and her daughter, Princess Atta. Every season, they are forced to give food to a gang of marauding grasshoppers led by Hopper. One day, when Flik, a misfit individualist and would-be inventor, inadvertently knocks the offering into a stream with his latest invention, a grain harvesting device, Hopper demands twice as much food as compensation. Vowing to redeem himself, Flik suggests in earnest that the ants send him to seek help from stronger bugs, much to their extreme delight (who secretely believe this will get Flik out of way).

Upon reaching the "bug city", which is a heap of trash under a trailer, Flik mistakes a troupe of Circus Bugs (who were recently laid off by their greedy ringmaster, P.T. Flea) for the warrior bugs he seeks. The bugs, in turn, mistake Flik for a talent agent and accept his offer to travel with him back to Ant Island. During a welcome ceremony upon their arrival, the Circus Bugs and Flik both discover their mutual misunderstandings. The Circus Bugs attempt to leave, but are attacked by a bird; while fleeing, they save Dot, Atta's younger sister, gaining the ants' respect in the process. At Flik's request, they continue the ruse of being "warriors" so the troupe can continue to enjoy the hospitality of the ants. Hearing that Hopper fears birds inspires Flik to propose the construction of false bird to scare away the grasshoppers. Meanwhile, Hopper reminds his gang how greatly the ants outnumber them and suspects that they will eventually rebel against them.

The ants finish constructing the fake bird, but during a celebration, P.T. Flea arrives, searching for his troupe and inadvertently reveals their secret. Outraged because the plan turned out to be a waste of time, the ants exile Flik for his dishonesty and desperately attempt to gather food for a new offering to the grasshoppers. However, when Hopper returns to discover the mediocre offering, he takes over the island and furiously demands the ants' winter food supply, planning to assassinate the Queen afterwards. Overhearing the plan, Dot persuades Flik and the Circus Bugs to return to Ant Island.

After the Circus Bugs distract the grasshoppers long enough to rescue the Queen, Flik deploys the bird; it initially fools the grasshoppers, but P.T. Flea, who also mistakes it for a real bird, burns it, exposing it as a decoy. Hopper has Flik beaten in retaliation, saying that the ants are humble and lowly life forms who live to serve the grasshoppers. However, Flik angrily responds that Hopper actually fears the colony, because he has always known what they are capable of, inspiring the ants and the Circus Bugs to fight back against the grasshoppers. The ants nearly force Hopper out of Ant Island using P.T. Flea's circus cannon, but it suddenly begins to rain. In the ensuing chaos, Hopper frees himself from the cannon and abducts Flik. After the Circus Bugs fail to catch them, Atta rescues Flik. As Hopper pursues them, Flik lures him to the nest of the bird he, Dot and the Circus Bugs encountered earlier. Thinking that the bird is another decoy, Hopper taunts it before discovering in panic that it is real and is captured and devoured alive by its chicks.

With their enemies gone, Flik has improved his inventions along with the quality of life for Ant Island; Hopper's younger brother Molt and a few ants become new members of P.T. Flea's troupe; Atta and Dot respectively become the new queen and princess; The ants congratulate Flik as a hero; and he and Atta have married, and they bid a fond farewell to the circus troupe.

## Cast and Characters

* Dave Foley as Flik
* Kevin Spacey as Hopper
* Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Princess Atta
* Hayden Panettiere as Dot
* Phyllis Diller as The Queen
* Richard Kind as Molt
* David Hyde Pierce as Slim
* Joe Ranft as Heimlich
* Denis Leary as Francis
* Jonathan Harris as Manny
* Madeline Kahn as Gypsy
* Bonnie Hunt as Rosie
* Michael McShane as Tuck and Roll
* John Ratzenberger as P.T. Flea
* Brad Garrett as Dim
* Roddy McDowal as Mr. Soil
* Edie McClurg as Dr. Flora
* Alex Rocco as Thorny
* David Ossman as Cornelius
* Rodger Bumpass as Harry
* Ashley Tisdale as Leader of the Blueberry Scouts
* David Lander as Thumper

## Music

See Also: A Bug's Life (Soundtrack)

The film's score was composed and conducted by Randy Newman. The soundtrack album was produced and released on October 27, 1998, by Walt Disney Records. The album's first track is a song called "The Time of Your Life" written and performed by Newman, while all the other 19 tracks are orchestral cues. Although the album was out of print physically in the United States during the 2000s, in June 2018 Universal Music Japan announced that a re-mastered edition would be released on October 3, 2018, along with other soundtrack albums from the Walt Disney Records pre-2018 catalogue. The album is also available for purchase on iTunes. The time duration is 47 minutes and 32 seconds. Out of five stars, Allmusic, Empire Online and Film Tracks rated the album three stars. Movie Wave rated it four and a half. The score won the Grammy Award for Best Instrumental Composition.

## Production

### Development

During the summer of 1994, Pixar's story department began turning their thoughts to their next film. The storyline for A Bug's Life originated from a lunchtime conversation between John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Pete Docter and Joe Ranft, the studio's head story team; other films such as Toy Story 2, Monsters, Inc. and Finding Nemo were also conceived at this lunch. Lasseter and his story team had already been drawn to the idea of insects serving as characters. Like toys, insects were within the reach of computer animation back then, due to their relatively simple surfaces. Stanton and Ranft wondered whether they could find a starting point in Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. Walt Disney had produced his own version with a cheerier ending decades earlier in the 1934 short film The Grasshopper and the Ants. In addition, Walt Disney Feature Animation had considered producing a film in the late-1980s entitled Army Ants, that centered around a pacifist ant living in a militaristic colony, but this never fully materialised.

As Stanton and Ranft discussed the adaptation, they rattled off scenarios and storylines springing from their premise. Lasseter liked the idea and offered some suggestions. The concept simmered until early 1995, when the story team began work on the second film in earnest. During an early test screening for Toy Story in San Rafael in June 1995, they pitched the film to Disney CEO Michael Eisner. Eisner thought the idea was fine and they submitted a treatment to Disney in early-July under the title Bugs. Disney approved the treatment and gave notice on July 7 that it was exercising the option of a second film under the original 1991 agreement between Disney and Pixar. Lasseter assigned the co-director job to Stanton; both worked well together and had similar sensibilities. Lasseter had realised that working on a computer-animated feature as a sole director was dangerous while the production of Toy Story was in process. In addition, Lasseter believed that it would relieve stress and that the role would groom Stanton for having his own position as a lead director.

### Writing

In The Ant and the Grasshopper, a grasshopper squanders the spring and summer months on singing while the ants put food away for the winter; when winter comes, the hungry grasshopper begs the ants for food, but the ants turn him away. Andrew Stanton and Joe Ranft hit on the notion that the grasshopper could just take the food. After Stanton had completed a draft of the script, he came to doubt one of the story's main pillars, that the Circus Bugs that had come to the colony to cheat the ants would instead stay and fight. He thought the Circus Bugs were unlikable characters as liars and that it was unrealistic for them to undergo a complete personality change. Also, no particularly good reason existed for Circus Bugs to stay with the ant colony during the second act. Although the film was already far along, Stanton concluded that the story needed a different approach.

Stanton took one of the early circus bug characters, Red the red ant and changed him into the character Flik. The Circus Bugs, no longer out to cheat the colony, would be embroiled in a comic misunderstanding as to why Flik was recruiting them. Lasseter agreed with this new approach and comedy writers Donald McEnery and Bob Shaw spent a few months working on further polishing with Stanton. The characters "Tuck and Roll" were inspired by a drawing that Stanton did of two bugs fighting when he was in the second grade. Lasseter had come to envision the film as an epic in the tradition of David Lean's 1962 film Lawrence of Arabia.

### Casting

The voice cast was heavy with television sitcom stars of the time. Flik was voiced by Dave Foley (from NewsRadio), Princess Atta was voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus (from Seinfeld), Molt was voiced by Richard Kind (from Spin City), Slim was voiced by David Hyde Pierce (from Frasier) and Dim was voiced by Brad Garrett (from Everybody Loves Raymond). Joe Ranft, member of Pixar's story team, played Heimlich the caterpillar at the suggestion of Lasseter's wife, Nancy, who had heard him playing the character on a scratch vocal track.

The casting of Hopper, the film's villain, proved problematic. Lasseter's top choice was Robert De Niro, who repeatedly turned the part down, as did a succession of other actors. Kevin Spacey met John Lasseter at the 1995 Academy Awards and Lasseter asked Spacey if he would be interested in doing the voice of Hopper. Spacey was delighted and signed on immediately.

A Bug's Life was the final film appearance of actor Roddy McDowall, who played Mr. Soil, before dying shortly before the film's theatrical release.

### Art Design and Animation

It was more difficult for animators during the production of A Bug's Life than that of Toy Story, as computers ran sluggishly due to the complexity of the character models. Lasseter and Stanton had two supervising animators to assist with directing and reviewing the animation, Rich Quade and Glenn McQueen. The first sequence to be animated and rendered was the circus sequence that culminated with P.T. Flea's "Flaming Wall of Death". Lasseter placed this scene first in the pipeline because he believed it was "less likely to change". Lasseter thought it would be useful to look at a view of the world from an insect's perspective. Two technicians obliged by creating a miniature video camera on Lego wheels, which they dubbed as the "Bugcam". Fastened to the end of a stick, the Bugcam could roll through grass and other terrain and send back an insect's-eye outlook. Lasseter was intrigued by the way grass, leaves and flower petals formed a translucent canopy, as if the insects were living under a stained-glass ceiling. The team also later sought inspiration from Microcosmos (1996), a French documentary on love and violence in the insect world.

The transition from treatment to storyboards took on an extra layer of complexity due to the profusion of storylines. Where Toy Story focused heavily on Woody and Buzz, with the other toys serving mostly as sidekicks, A Bug's Life required in-depth storytelling for several major groups of characters. Character design also presented a new challenge, in that the designers had to make ants appear likable. Although the animators and the art department studied insects more closely, natural realism would give way to the film's larger needs. The team took out mandibles and designed the ants to stand upright, replacing their normal six legs with two arms and two legs. The grasshoppers, in contrast, received a pair of extra appendages to appear less attractive. The story's scale also required software engineers to accommodate new demands. Among these was the need to handle shots with crowds of ants. The film would include more than 400 such shots in the ant colony, some with as many as 800. It was impractical for animators to control them individually, but neither could the ants remain static for even a moment without appearing lifeless, or move identically. Bill Reeves, one of the film's two supervising technical directors, dealt with the quandary by leading the development of software for autonomous ants. The animators would only animate four or five groups of about eight individual "universal ants". Each one of these "universal ants" would later be randomly distributed throughout the digital set. The program also allowed each ant to be automatically modified in subtle ways (e.g. different colour of eye or skin, different heights, different weights, etc.). This ensured that no two ants were the same. It was partly based on Reeves's invention of particle systems a decade and a half earlier, which had let animators use masses of self-guided particles to create effects like swirling dust and snow.

The animators also employed subsurface scattering, developed by Pixar co-founder Edwin Catmull during his graduate student days at the University of Utah in the 1970s, to render surfaces in a more lifelike way. This would be the first time that subsurface scattering would be used in a Pixar film and a small team at Pixar worked out the practical problems that kept it from working in animation. Catmull asked for a short film to test and showcase subsurface scattering and the result, Geri's Game (1997), was attached alongside A Bug's Life in its theatrical release.

## Reception

### Critical Reception

On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 92% based on 87 reviews and an average rating of 7.9 out of 10. The site's critical consensus reads, "A Bug's Life is a rousing adventure that blends animated thrills with witty dialogue and memorable characters and another smashing early success for Pixar." Another review aggregator, Metacritic, gave the film a score of 77 out of 100 based on 23 critics, indicating "generally favourable reviews".

Todd McCarthy of Variety wrote, "Lasseter and Pixar broke new technical and aesthetic ground in the animation field with Toy Story and here they surpass it in both scope and complexity of movement while telling a story that overlaps Antz in numerous ways." James Berardinelli of ReelViews gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying "A Bug's Life, like Toy Story, develops protagonists we can root for and places them in the midst of a fast-moving, energetic adventure." Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film three and a half stars out of four, saying "Will A Bug's Life suffer by coming out so soon after Antz? Not any more than one thriller hurts the chances for the next one. Antz may even help business for A Bug's Life by demonstrating how many dramatic and comedic possibilities can be found in an anthill." Kenneth Turan of the Los Angeles Times gave the film four out of five stars, saying "What A Bug's Life demonstrates is that when it comes to bugs, the most fun ones to hang out with hang exclusively with the gang at Pixar." Peter Stack of the San Francisco Chronicle gave the film four out of four stars, saying "A Bug's Life is one of the great movies, a triumph of storytelling and character development, and a whole new ballgame for computer animation. Pixar Animation Studios has raised the genre to an astonishing new level".

Richard Corliss of Time wrote, "The plot matures handsomely; the characters neatly converge and combust; the gags pay off with emotional resonance." Owen Gleiberman of Entertainment Weekly gave the film a B, saying "A Bug's Life may be the single most amazing film I've ever seen that I couldn't fall in love with." Paul Clinton of CNN wrote, "A Bug's Life is a perfect movie for the holidays. It contains a great upbeat message... it's wonderful to look at... it's wildly inventive... and it's entertaining for both adults and kids." Michael Wilmington of the Chicago Tribune gave the film three and a half stars out of four, and compared the movie to "Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (with a little of another art-film legend, Federico Fellini, tossed in)." where "As in Samurai, the colony here is plagued every year by the arrival of bandits." On the contrary, Stephen Hunter of The Washington Post wrote, "Clever as it is, the film lacks charm. One problem: too many bugs. Second, bigger world for two purposes: to feed birds and to irk humans."

### Box Office

A Bug's Life grossed approximately $33,258,052 on its opening weekend, ranking number 1 for that weekend. It managed to retain its number 1 spot for two weeks. The film grossed $162.8 million in its United States theatrical run, covering its estimated production costs of $120 million. The film made $200,460,294 in foreign countries, pushing its worldwide gross to $363.3 million, surpassing the competition from DreamWorks Animation's Antz.

## Home Media

A Bug's Life was the first home video release to be entirely created using a digital transfer. Every frame of animation was converted from the film's computer data, as opposed to the standard analog film-to-videotape transfer process. This allowed for the film's DVD release to retain its original 2.35:1 widescreen format. The DVD was released on April 20, 1999, alongside a VHS release which was presented in a standard 1.33:1 "fullscreen" format. The film's fullscreen transfer was performed by entirely "reframing" the film shot by shot; more than half of the film's footage was modified by Pixar animators to fit within the film's aspect ratio. Several characters and objects were moved closer together to avoid being cut out of frame. The film's VHS release was the best-selling VHS in the United Kingdom, with 1.76 million units sold by the end of the year. On August 1, 2000, these editions were rereleased on VHS and DVD under the Walt Disney Gold Classic Collection banner.

On November 23, 1999, a 2-disc Collector's Edition DVD was released. This DVD was fully remastered in anamorphic widescreen and has substantial bonus features. This edition was re-released on May 27, 2003, adding a set-top game and a Finding Nemo featurette.

On May 19, 2009, the film was released on Blu-ray.

The film was released on 4K Blu-ray on March 3, 2020.

## Merchandise

### Video Game

See Also: A Bug's Life (Video Game)

A game, based on the film, was developed by Traveller's Tales and Tiertex Design Studios and released by Sony Computer Entertainment, Disney Interactive, THQ and Activision for various systems. The game's storyline was similar to the film's, with a few changes. However, unlike the film, the game received mixed to negative reviews. Aggregating review website GameRankings gave the Nintendo 64 version 54.40%, the PlayStation version 51.90% and the Game Boy Color version 36.63%. GameSpot gave the PlayStation version a 2.7/10, concluding that it was "obvious that Disney was more interested in producing a $40 advertisement for its movie than in developing a playable game." IGN gave the Nintendo 64 version a 6.8 out of 10, praising the presentation and sound by stating "It was upbeat, cheery look and feel very much like the movie of the same name with cheery, happy tunes and strong sound effects but again criticised the gameplay by saying the controls were sluggish with stuttering framerate and tired gameplay mechanics". while they gave the PlayStation version a 4 out of 10, criticising the gameplay as slow and awkward but praising the presentation as cinematic.

## Theme Park Attractions

* A Bug's Land
* Flik's Flyers
* Francis' Ladybug Boogie
* Heimlich's Chew Chew Train
* It's Tough to Be a Bug!