I more or less fell in love with Pixar’s work as soon as I saw the original Toy Story. Combining at-the-time cutting edge computer generated animation with a rather deep story for a children’s flick. As such, I have seen most of Pixar’s output. Oddly enough, I hadn’t seen the second Pixar feature, A Bug’s Life, before. That was not for lack of trying. I did rent A Bug’s Life from the local Blockbuster back in the day, but sadly the DVD there didn’t work for some reason in our home DVD player.
But hey, I got Disney+ and they have A Bug’s Life on there, so here we are.
The movie begins with an ant colony laboring away, gathering food. However, the food isn’t for them. It’s an offering to a gang of grasshoppers led by the villainous Hopper (Kevin Spacey, back when it was OK to use him in movies). The problem is Flik (Dave Foley), an inventive ant who can build some handy gadgets that the rest of the colony doesn’t see a use for. He’s also clumsy, so when he ends up losing the grasshopper’s food bribe, things get bad. The ants, under threat from Hopper, opt to try again to their own detriment, but Flik goes off to the big city to find some warriors.
He instead finds a group of unemployed circus bugs.
So, A Bug’s Life is a generally fun movie. The story isn’t particularly revolutionary, hitting the standard Pixar beats where our hero gets in over his head, gets found out, goes into a deep funk, and then rises above to save the day without quite everything going by the original plan. The voice cast is full of recognizable but, aside from Spacey, no one who I would call a huge star in 1998. Or, for that matter, 2019. These are actors with recognizable names and voices, but not necessarily someone who would be a lead in something.
That’s actually a plus. These are actors with voices full of personality like Dave Foley, Richard Kind, Jonathan Harris, Denis Leary, Phyllis Diller, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Madeline Kahn, and Brad Garrett. Voices like this are recognizable without being distracting like, say, the voice cast of Antz.
That said, the animation is, while cutting edge for its time, clearly not as good as what the studio is doing right now. That’s to be expected. The technology improves as time goes by, and Pixar likes to push itself into new areas. So, while I can recognize that the studio was doing the best it could back then, it doesn’t quite hold up to what it’s doing now. And as much as I understand that, my mind still sees the difference and wanted more. My mind sucks sometimes.
But I did like A Bug’s Life even if I didn’t love it. It’s a fine entry into the Pixar canon, and I am somewhat baffled why it never got a sequel. Maybe it was because of Hopper’s rather gruesome death for a Disney movie, but maybe they just didn’t have a story for it and actually respect the property enough not to milk it for more than it has. God knows they have done that plenty of times in the past…
Grade: B
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