November 26–December 3, 1998

movie shorts

A Bug's Life

Lazy grasshoppers and funny slugs in an inventively animated insect-fest.

by Vance Lehmkuhl

Directed by John Lasseter

A Walt Disney Pictures/Pixar Release

Recommended

Though Disney/Pixar's A Bug's Life was conceived back before Dreamworks even existed (and while Dreamworks cofounder Jeff Katzenberg was—ahem—still at Disney), the upstart studio beat Disney/Pixar to the opening-weekend punch this fall with its Brand X knockoff, ANTZ. Unfortunately, this means it's now impossible to consider the one without comparing the two.

Both movies are computer-animated, and both use ants to look at "the one" vs. "the many," but the take in Bug's is both richer and broader than ANTZ's bargain-basement Orwell. Like Zee, Flik (Dave Foley) is a nebbishy individualist who woos the princess, and whose singular bent lands him in trouble with the colony. However, here the supporting cast of different kinds of bugs—grasshoppers, flies, spiders, a ladybug, a praying mantis, etc.—fleshes the theme out so it's not just another clash of free spirits vs. Nazis. The main question is, can Flik and the ragtag band of misfits he's hired outwit the grasshopper gang that terrorizes the colony and extort their food every year?

In getting to the answer, Bug's delivers an abundance of what ANTZ could have used more of: belly laughs. Instead of periodic Woody Allen one-liners, Bug's is packed with over-the-top gags that zip by faster than a dragonfly. One ant, shocked at the grasshoppers' arrival, blurts, "Jiminy H. Cricket!" The slothful grasshoppers while away their downtime in a Tijuana-style bar, singing "La Cucaracha." A slug in a restaurant protests "Hey! I said no SALT!" as his lips burn away; and my favorite, a homeless grasshopper on a street corner, plays his legs as a violin, holding the sign "Kid Pulled My Wings Off." The movie even mocks The Lion King, as Hopper (Kevin Spacey) scams the ants with the line, "It's a bug-eat-bug world out there—a Circle of Life kinda thing."

It's not just jokes, though. There's more dimensionality to this movie, a greater depth of field and a much wider color range. Blades of grass wave independently far into the background, and the ants' underground homes are lit by phosphorescent mushrooms. And although the ants are light blue with a very plasticky sheen, other textures in the movie (notably the grasshoppers' skin) are more rugged and realistic, some actually approaching the computer-animation holy grail of looking "organic."

The characters are well-articulated (within the confines of Disney, that is) by an all-star cast led by Foley, Spacey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus. Denis Leary is excellent as Francis, a male ladybug who finally learns to embrace his feminine side. Madeline Kahn and the late Roddy McDowall are wasted in tiny roles, but David Hyde Pierce puts an indelible stamp on Slim the Walking Stick, and Bonnie Hunt's impudent charm makes Rosie the Black Widow dangerously attractive.

This is not to say that the current movie is another Toy Story, which rewrote the book on computer generated imagery. Ironically, though the animation here is better and the story more balanced, Bug's does have its share of slow spots and predictable "twists," and doesn't up the ante significantly over its predecessor. But let's be fair—for Pixar, making a movie that's even a mite more visually dazzling than Toy Story is quite a feat. And certainly this is a far brighter and sharper Disney feature than any of the hand-drawn entries since Aladdin.

In sum, while ANTZ tried to use crayons to pull off sophisticated social commentary, creating a lowest-common-denominator novelty, A Bug's Life is a simple story rendered so richly and inventively that it appeals on multiple levels. Sure, it's candy-coated popcorn—glittery, full of hot air, resolutely insubstantial—but an hour later I was already hungry to see it again.