A Bug’s Life opened in the United States on November 25, 1998, three years after Toy Story. It was Pixar’s follow-up to that film, produced for Walt Disney Pictures. The studio trades talking toys for a colony of ants, and it mostly earns the bet.
Trailer, via Pixar.
Flik, Hopper, and a Creekbed Called Ant Island
The setup is clean. A colony of ants lives in a seasonally dry creekbed on a hill called Ant Island. Every summer they hand over food to a gang of grasshoppers led by Hopper. The ants are bigger in number and smaller in nerve, and Hopper knows it. He reminds his gang that the ants outnumber them, and warns that the ants will rebel if they are not kept in line. That single line is the whole engine of the movie: the villain’s power is a bluff that only works while everyone believes it.
Flik, voiced by Dave Foley, is the misfit. He is an inventor, kind-hearted and prone to incompetence, and the other ants keep their distance. When his grain harvester spills the offering, Hopper demands twice as much food as compensation. Flik then suggests the colony enlist bigger bugs to fight the grasshoppers. Princess Atta, voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, sees the idea as a way to get rid of him and sends him off.
Flik travels to the city — a heap of trash under a trailer — and mistakes a troupe of jobless Circus Bugs for the warriors he came to hire. The Circus Bugs mistake him for a talent agent and follow him home. Both sides figure out the mix-up at a welcome ceremony. The troupe tries to leave, gets chased by a bird, and saves Atta’s younger sister Dot, voiced by Hayden Panettiere, from it. That rescue buys them the colony’s respect. At Flik’s request, they keep playing warriors so they can keep enjoying the ants’ hospitality.
A Bird, a Lie, and P.T. Flea
Learning that Hopper fears birds gives Flik his plan: build a crude ornithopter disguised as a bird and scare the grasshoppers off. The ants finish the fake bird. Then the troupe’s old supervisor, P.T. Flea, shows up looking to rehire them, blows their cover, and the colony’s faith in the plan collapses.
The movie’s best idea is that the con and the courage are the same thing. Flik lies to his colony, and the lie accidentally recruits a group of performers who turn out to be brave when it counts. The circus bugs are not warriors. They are clowns, and that is the joke and the point. A Bug’s Life is a movie about the difference between what a thing looks like and what it will do when the bird comes.
Foley, Spacey, and a Sitcom Cast
The voice cast is heavy with television sitcom stars of the time. Foley came from NewsRadio. Louis-Dreyfus came from Seinfeld. Richard Kind, who plays Molt, came from Spin City. David Hyde Pierce, who plays Slim, came from Frasier. Brad Garrett, who plays Dim, came from Everybody Loves Raymond.
Kevin Spacey is the standout as Hopper. Lasseter’s first choice for the villain was Robert De Niro, who turned the part down repeatedly, as did a succession of other actors. Spacey met Lasseter at the 1995 Academy Awards, and Lasseter asked whether he would be interested in voicing Hopper. Spacey signed on immediately. He plays the character as a manager, not a monster — a guy running a protection racket who has done the math on his own workforce.
The rest of the ensemble: 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 Moth, and Bonnie Hunt as Rosie. Ranft got the part of Heimlich at the suggestion of Lasseter’s wife, Nancy, who had heard him doing the character on a scratch vocal track. The film was also the last screen appearance of Roddy McDowall, who played Mr. Soil and died shortly before the theatrical release.
What the Numbers Say
- Premiere: November 14, 1998, at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles
- U.S. release: November 25, 1998
- Runtime: 95 minutes
- Metacritic: 78/100
- Score: 7.8/10
- Gross: $363 million at the box office
- Music: Randy Newman
Production began shortly after Toy Story came out in 1995. The ants were redesigned to be more appealing, and Pixar’s animation unit used technical innovations in computer animation to build them. The plot was initially inspired by Aesop’s fable The Ant and the Grasshopper.
There is also the fight that surrounded the release. A public feud erupted between Steve Jobs and Lasseter of Pixar and DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg over the parallel production of Antz, a similar film that came out the month before. That is a piece of studio history, not a piece of the movie, and it is worth keeping separate.
A Troupe of Circus Bugs, Not Warriors
The film’s weakness is that it is tidier than it is daring. The colony’s distrust of Flik, the misunderstanding with the circus bugs, the fake bird, the exposure, the rally — every beat lands where a family film in 1998 was expected to land it. The ants are appealing because they were redesigned to be, and the humor is broad.
What holds up is the premise underneath the slapstick. A protection racket is a strange thing to build a children’s movie around, and the film never softens what Hopper is doing: he takes food from the ants and demands more as compensation. The grasshoppers are not foraging. They are collecting.
A Bug’s Life is not Toy Story, in this paper’s view. It does not have that film’s ache, and its villain is more memorable than its hero. But it is a confident second feature from a studio that was still proving the technology could carry a story, and it takes a small, concrete world, gives it a real problem, and lets the smallest character solve it.
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