8 / 10
The Pixar Film Nobody Talks About
A Bug’s Life is the Pixar film nobody talks about. It came between Toy Story and Toy Story 2, it made a lot of money and got good reviews, and then it quietly slipped out of the conversation while the studio went on to Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and The Incredibles. That’s a shame, because it’s a warm, funny, handsomely made film with one of the best villains Pixar ever produced.
John Lasseter directed it, with Andrew Stanton as co-director, and it came out in November 1998, a few weeks after DreamWorks rushed out its own ant film, Antz. The two films became the subject of a very public feud, and A Bug’s Life won it at the box office. I give it an 8. It isn’t quite a Pixar masterpiece, and it’s much better than its place in the studio’s history suggests.
Seven Samurai With Ants
The story is borrowed from Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, by way of The Magnificent Seven and the old fable of the ant and the grasshopper. Every year, a colony of ants on an island gathers food, and every year a gang of grasshoppers arrives and takes a large share of it as an offering. This year, a clumsy inventor ant named Flik accidentally knocks the whole offering into the water.
The grasshoppers’ leader, Hopper, gives the colony until the end of the season to gather twice as much. Flik, desperate to make amends, volunteers to leave the island and find warrior bugs to fight the grasshoppers. The colony, relieved to be rid of him, agrees. He goes to the big city and returns with what he believes are fearsome warriors.
They’re a troupe of out-of-work circus performers, who believe Flik has hired them to perform. It’s a classic misunderstanding, and the film gets a great deal of comedy and a surprising amount of heart out of it.
For Writers
A Bug’s Life borrows the structure of Seven Samurai and fills it with bugs. The familiar shape lets the film spend its energy on characters and jokes.
When you write a familiar story, borrowing a proven structure can free you to invent where it matters most. Readers enjoy recognizing the shape.
Choose a classic plot you admire, list its main turning points, and set your own characters loose in it. Spend your originality on who they are, not on what happens.
Flik
Flik is an inventor in a colony that values conformity above everything. He builds a machine to harvest grain faster, a telescope from a dewdrop and a dozen other gadgets, and every one of them causes a disaster. The other ants think he’s a menace, and the royal family, especially Princess Atta, wishes he would just do his job like everyone else.
Dave Foley voices him with a nervous, eager sincerity that makes him likeable even at his most irritating. He’s the classic Pixar hero, an outsider whose difference turns out to be what saves everyone, and the film lets him fail and be humiliated before it lets him succeed. His inventions cause chaos throughout the film and end up providing the solution.
He’s also a gentle study of what it’s like to be the person in a group who can’t stop suggesting better ways of doing things. Everyone finds him exhausting, and he’s usually right. The film understands both halves of that, and it never makes the colony simply wrong for being tired of him.
The Circus Bugs
The troupe Flik brings back is the best thing in the film. P.T. Flea, voiced by John Ratzenberger, runs the failing circus and cares only about money. Heimlich is a fat German caterpillar who is always eating and dreams of becoming a beautiful butterfly. Slim is a walking stick tired of being used as a broom. Rosie is a black widow who acts as the troupe’s warm-hearted mother, and Dim is a huge, gentle rhinoceros beetle who carries everyone.
Tuck and Roll are pill bugs who speak only Hungarian and fight constantly. Gypsy and Manny are a moth and a praying mantis who perform a magic act, voiced by Madeline Kahn and Jonathan Harris. And Francis is a male ladybug who’s tired of everyone assuming he’s female, and gets the angriest, funniest lines. Denis Leary plays him with barely controlled rage.
Each has one clear trait, and the film uses every one of them in the climax. They’re the heart of the film, a group of misfits who have been laughed at all their lives and who finally discover that they can be heroes. Their arc mirrors Flik’s, and together they make the story’s argument about outsiders.
The City
Flik’s trip takes him to a bug city built in a trailer park, under a caravan, with shops, bars and streets made from discarded tins, boxes, bottles and rubbish. It’s a clever piece of design, the insect equivalent of a busy human city, and it’s full of jokes: a mosquito ordering a drink of blood at a bar, a fly who can’t resist a bug zapper, a cockroach begging on the street.
It’s where the film’s scale finally becomes clear. The ants’ island is a tiny world in the shadow of a tree, and the city shows how huge and strange the wider world is for a creature the size of Flik. The sequence is one of the most visually inventive in any Pixar film, and it rewards pausing to look at the details.
This is where Flik meets the circus, in a bar fight that the troupe accidentally wins, and where the film’s central misunderstanding is born. Flik sees warriors. The circus bugs see a talent agent. Neither side asks the obvious question, and the film gets an hour of comedy out of that silence.
Hopper
Hopper, the leader of the grasshoppers, is one of Pixar’s best villains, and Kevin Spacey gives him a real menace. He’s a tyrant who understands exactly why his tyranny works. The grasshoppers could feed themselves, and some of them ask why they bother coming back to the island every year. Hopper explains it to them in the film’s most important scene.
He takes a single grain and throws it at one of his gang. It doesn’t hurt. Then he throws a mountain of grain, and it buries them. The ants outnumber the grasshoppers a hundred to one, he says, and if they ever realize it, the grasshoppers are finished. It’s not about food. It’s about keeping the ants in line.
It’s a surprisingly political speech for a children’s film, a clear, simple lesson about how the few control the many, and it’s the key to the whole story. The ants’ victory, when it comes, isn’t about the circus bugs or the fake bird. It’s about the ants finally understanding what Hopper already knows.
For Writers
Hopper explains his power with a single handful of grain. The villain understands the story’s real theme better than the heroes do.
Write one scene where your villain explains, calmly and correctly, why they’re winning. Then make the hero’s victory depend on learning the same lesson. For more, see my article on why villain motivations fall apart.
When you write an antagonist, giving them the clearest understanding of the stakes makes them more frightening and more interesting.
The Bird
Birds are the only thing grasshoppers fear, and Flik comes up with a plan: build a fake bird from leaves, twigs and grass, and use it to scare Hopper’s gang away for good. The circus bugs operate it, and the whole colony works together to build it. It’s itself a small revolution in a colony that has never done anything new.
The sequence where the bird rises over the island and the grasshoppers scatter in terror is thrilling. Then the trick is discovered, partly because of P.T. Flea’s greed, and Hopper is furious. The ants are left with no plan and no bird, and the film has to find a better ending. It does. It’s the right one: the ants stand up for themselves.
The Climax in the Rain
The final act takes place in a rainstorm. For creatures the size of ants, it’s like being bombed. Every raindrop is huge. Hopper drags Flik away to kill him, and the ants finally rise up together, following Flik’s example and Hopper’s own lesson about numbers.
Hopper meets his end at the hands of a real bird, feeding him to her chicks, a grim and satisfying fate for a villain who used birds as his only fear. The storm sequence is beautifully animated, with each drop landing with weight. The finale is exciting. It also brings every thread together: Flik’s courage, the circus bugs’ loyalty, Atta’s growth as a leader and the colony’s discovery that there are far more of them than there are grasshoppers.
For Writers
The ants win by standing together, not by the fake bird. The trick fails, and the real victory comes from the colony finally understanding its own strength.
Let your heroes’ clever plan fall apart at the worst moment, and make them win with something they’ve learned about themselves along the way.
When you write a climax built on a clever plan, having the plan fail forces your characters to find something deeper. The second solution is often the true one.
The Technical Leap
A Bug’s Life was a huge technical step for Pixar after Toy Story. It had hundreds of ants on screen at once, each animated individually, and new software was developed to make crowd scenes possible. The outdoor lighting, through leaves and grass and water, was far more complex than anything in Toy Story’s bedrooms and back yards.
It was also Pixar’s first film in the wide CinemaScope format. That let the animators show vast landscapes of grass and sky. Much of what the studio achieved later, the crowds in Monsters, Inc., the underwater light of Finding Nemo, was learned here. Watched now, it still looks lovely, and it has aged far better than most computer animation of its decade, because its designers chose a stylised look instead of chasing realism.
The Antz Rivalry
Jeffrey Katzenberg had left Disney after a bitter falling-out, founded DreamWorks and started an ant film of his own. John Lasseter, who had told Katzenberg about A Bug’s Life while he was still at Disney, felt betrayed, and the two studios’ films became a public feud. DreamWorks rushed Antz into cinemas a month earlier.
In the end, both films did well, and A Bug’s Life made considerably more. The rivalry is mostly forgotten now, and the films can be watched side by side as two very different takes on the same idea. Antz is darker, more adult and more cynical. A Bug’s Life is warmer, funnier and more beautiful, and it has better characters.
The feud also shaped the next decade of American animation. DreamWorks went on to Shrek, built on irreverence and pop culture, and Pixar went on to a run of heartfelt originals. Watching the two ant films side by side is like watching the two studios’ personalities being born.
Craft Note
Craft Note
A Bug’s Life turns its heroes’ greatest weakness into their plan. The circus bugs can’t fight, but they can put on a show, and the fake bird they build nearly beats the grasshoppers on its own.
When you write characters who are outmatched, the temptation is to give them a sudden power in the final act. That feels cheap, because the reader never saw it coming.
Look at the skill your weakest characters already have and design the climax so that skill is what nearly works. Let their real victory come from what they learn when it fails.
The Verdict on A Bug’s Life
Yes. It’s an 8, a warm, funny and beautifully made film that deserves more attention than it gets. Watch it for the circus bugs, for Hopper’s speech and for the city in the trailer park, and watch Antz afterwards to see how differently two studios told the same story.
Frequently Asked Questions
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