Film
A Bug’s Life
- Director
- John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton
- Certificate
- U
- Running Time
- 94 mins
Pixar’s follow-up to Toy Story was released back in 1999 in the wake of DreamWorks’ Antz, the two rival films boasting extraordinary plot similarities (lone ant battles against tyranny).
In an ant colony living in fear of a horde of tyrannical grasshoppers led by the merciless Hopper (Kevin Spacey), well-meaning but cack-handed inventor Flik (Dave Foley) is trying to perfect a device to speed up the grain harvest when he accidentally manages to destroy the offering so painstakingly collected over the summer months. Hopper and his goons are not best pleased and deliver an ultimatum: produce another, double-sized offering or face summary “squishing”. Knowing that this will be impossible, Flik apologises to the Queen (Phyllis Diller) and lovely Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) and sets off in an improvised aircraft on a quest to locate a band of creepy-crawly mercenaries who will defend the colony in its hour of need. Eventually, he recruits a bunch of disaffected bugs at sleazy P.T. Flea’s trash city circus, his comical misunderstanding of the phrase “knock ‘em dead” setting up a spectacular finale in which our hymenopterous heroes learn a big Disney lesson about self-reliance.
If Antz was the more narratively adventurous animated antfest, A Bug’s Life still has plenty to commend it. Filmed, as the credits remind us, entirely on location, it benefits from a uniquely rich pastel colour palette, glistening three-dimensional surfaces and distinctive “lighting” effects that were state-of-the-art for computer animation back in the ‘90s. There are plenty of stand-out moments of technical triumph: the aerial bombardment of rainfall, the dystopian bug city (where a beggar wears a sign reading “A boy pulled my wings off”), and so on. The circus troupe are a well-characterised bunch too, especially Denis Leary’s irritable male ladybug and Bonnie Hunt’s deceptively pleasant black widow spider, who’s been through a dozen husbands. Stick around for the closing credits, which contain the film’s funniest scenes.
is needed now More than ever
A Bug’s Life launches the Watershed’s summer Bugs on Film season of creepy-crawly action.
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