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A Bug's Life is a 1998 American computer-animated comedy film produced by Pixar Animation Studios for Walt Disney Pictures. It was the second film produced by Pixar. Directed by John Lasseter and co-directed and written by Andrew Stanton, the film involves a misfit ant, Flik, who is looking for "tough warriors" to save his colony from a protection racket run by Hopper's gang of grasshoppers. Unfortunately, the "warriors" he brings back turn out to be an inept troupe of Circus Bugs.
The film was initially inspired by Aesop's fable The Ant and the Grasshopper. Production began shortly after the release of Toy Story in 1995. The screenplay was penned by Stanton and comedy writers Donald McEnery and Bob Shaw from a story by Lasseter, Stanton, and Ranft. The ants in the film were redesigned to be more appealing, and Pixar's animation unit employed technical innovations in computer animation. Randy Newman composed the music for the film. During production, a controversial public feud erupted between Steve Jobs and Lasseter of Pixar and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg due to the parallel production of his similar film Antz, which was released the same year.
The film was released on November 20, 1998, received positive reviews and grossed $363 million at the box office. It was the first film to be digitally transferred frame-by-frame and released on DVD, and has been released multiple times on home video.
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 Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo and WALL-E 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 materialized.
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 realized 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.
Jim Carrey was originally considered for the role of Flik before the role was later given to Dave Foley.
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 color 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.
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.
Critical response
On review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes, the film has a rating of 92% based on 88 reviews and an average rating of 7.87/10. 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 favorable reviews".
Legacy
In the years since its release, A Bug's Life has been regarded by critics and fans to be a Pixar film that, in contrast to its successors, has become largely forgotten by audiences. While recognized as solidifying Pixar's success, the film has been seen as the studio's sophomore slump in the wake of the critically-successful Toy Story, and inhibited by being released directly before the equally-revered Toy Story 2. Pixar's feud with Dreamworks as a result of Antz has also been regarded as a factor in A Bug's Life's legacy.
Critics have generally ranked A Bug's Life to be one of Pixar's weaker releases; while it has been seen as a "charming" and "ambitious" film with pioneering animation for its time, others have described it as "adequate" and appealing more to a younger demographic. However, the film's characters, voice acting, and humor have received lasting praise.
Media and merchandise
The film's theatrical and video releases include Geri's Game, an Academy Award winning Pixar short made in 1997, a year before this film was released.
Theme park attractions
Disney's Animal Kingdom includes the 3D show It's Tough to Be a Bug!, which also existed at Disney California Adventure from 2001 to 2018. The Disney California Adventure nighttime show World of Color features a segment that includes Heimlich, the caterpillar from the film.
Former theme park attractions
From 2002 to 2018, A Bug's Land was a section of Disney California Adventure that was inspired by the film.
(Wikipedia)