Pixar Pint #2: A Bug's Life

Pixar's second film still disappoints 24 years later

Welcome back to Pixar Pints, our summer-long journey through all 25 Pixar films in release order.

Today’s film is A Bug’s Life, Pixar’s often overlooked second film. Sandwiched between the first two Toy Story films, it evidently advanced the 3D animation medium in ways Toy Story didn’t, but is usually considered a step back from the firm’s first feature film.

Let’s get into it.

A Bug’s Life quick facts

Release date: November 20, 1998 | Director: John Lasseter | Music: Randy Newman

Starring: Dave Foley (Flik), Kevin Spacey (Hopper), Julia Louis-Dreyfus (Atta)

John Ratzenberger as: P.T. Flea

Budget: $120 million | Box office: $363.3 million

Eli

This is the first time I'd seen this movie despite it being the first Pixar movie to debut after I was born.

Aesthetic: 4/10 | It's really hard to make a movie about ants look good, and I think Pixar failed here. 95% of the ant characters look the exact same and they're all this really bland periwinkle that blends in too much to the ground, which is almost always a really dull tan. I'll give it points for looking true to life, but they sacrificed some creativity and vibrancy in the process and that's not really what I want in a children's cartoon.

Animation: 9/10 | Only a couple spots I thought were obviously wonky, but a lot of spots I thought were noteworthy in how well they were done. Various really complicated effects (fire, rain/water, flight of bugs, flapping wings) were done in an overwhelmingly realistic manner, which gives them points here that they lost in Aesthetic. A lot of neat tricks to distract from the dull backdrops.

Story: 8/10 | It flows a lot more freely than Toy Story's did, and the characters' actions by and large made a lot more sense. My main gripe is with the exposition: in both of the scenes where we meet all of the protagonists (the very first scene of the movie with the ants; a few scenes later with the circus bugs), there's just way too much going on at once. They were both just information dumps, and I couldn't parse which information was relevant or not until well after the fact. I think there are a lot of good messages to take away from how this story progressed and resolved.

Characters: 2/10 | Hit or miss, but the hits aren't as good as the misses are bad. The ant protagonists (Flik, Atta, Dot, and the Queen) are good-not-great. Flik and Atta's romance is kind of contrived to me; it's built on both being universally, undeservedly seen as failures, and while I understand why people view Flik that way, it's not clear why they think that of Atta. It's also never truly clear to me that Atta views Flik as a romantic interest, but the movie goes over the top in making it clear that the reverse is true; I'm not convinced they didn't just end the movie as really good friends. Meanwhile, most of the circus bugs are horrible stereotypes. Manny the mantis is a Chinese stereotype. His wife is a gypsy moth named Gypsy, who we're led to believe is named as such because of her species, but she acts like a stereotyped Romani. The two roly polies are eastern European stereotypes. Heimlich the caterpillar is a "fat German kid" stereotype. Francis the ladybug's whole entire character is "man who constantly gets mistaken for woman", which isn't funny now and I don’t think it ever truly was. Slim the stickbug is funny, as is P.T. Flea, a hypercapitalist ringleader with big Mr. Krabs vibes. The grasshoppers are implied to be Mexican for no real reason; they don't have accents and no other part of their personality is obviously meant to portray any ethnicity. It's pretty awful that they made the parasitic villains an already casually hated minority.

Acting: 8/10 | Exactly two characters are, I think, notably well acted: The Queen (Phyllis Diller) and P.T. Flea (old reliable John Ratzenberger). Pretty much everyone else is fine, which is disappointing because the cast has some all-star power: Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Hayden Panettiere, Denis Leary, Kevin Spacey. None of these people turn in noteworthy performances and it's sad.

Music: 3/10 | This is where Leah and I differ. I just watched this movie and I can't remember a single bar of music. It was a non-entity for me. I completely forgot Randy Newman did this score until the only vocal piece started playing over the credits.

Final score: 6/10 | It's above average, but not by much. The overwrought characters don't quite take away from a well written story enough to irreparably hamper my enjoyment of it, but they and the uninspiring aesthetics are enough to make me not want to relive the experience.

Leah

Aesthetic: 5/10 | They did a decent job making the ants look cute. I liked the water. Bugs are kind of a hard sell when it comes to aesthetic though. This movie also didn't have the super gorgeous scenery that Pixar will come to be known for. It looks better than Antz.

Animation: 8/10 | I loved the way they animated the water! It was cool how they made it look like it would from the perspective of a bug. Animating water isn't easy. I thought the characters moved pretty well, especially considering this is still the ‘90s. Pixar continues to push the medium ahead.

Story: 8/10 | Solid narrative about standing up for yourself, being open to new ideas, working together to overcome oppression. It was chaotic in places, but the structure overall held up. Thematically, I can get behind standing up to people wanting to exploit your labor. (Eli and I talked about how this went the other way from the capitalistic themes of Toy Story.)

Characters: 3/10 | So. Many. Stereotypes. Why were the grasshoppers Mexican? Why was the caterpillar German? Why was a character given a literal racial slur as a name?!?!? The whole joke with Francis the ladybug wasn't funny. Flik, Dot, Atta, and the Queen were all fine characters for a kids’ movie, but they couldn't bring back the mess that all the other bug characters brought in. It really soured the viewing experience for me, though P.T. Flea was great.

Acting: 8/10 | Not quite as iconic as Toy Story, but nothing too egregious.

Music: 8/10 | The opening sequence stood out to me. I definitely got early Pixar vibes listening to the soundtrack. I thought it was good.

Final score: 6/10 | This movie had good elements, but the stereotypical characters and unfunny jokes based off of them really brought this one down for me. It also is probably one of the least visually appealing Pixar movies (if not the least; TBD). Still, it has a solid story and was competently acted, animated, and scored. Not amazing, but there was stuff to like and it could have been worse.

Maddy

Aesthetic: 3/10 | Man, this movie just looks empty and boring to me at times. And the character designs are just not doing it for me. I get that it’s 1998, but man.

Animation: 8/10 | However, for 1998, this is vast improvement over Toy Story in the animation department and looking back, it’s a more interesting film to study for early CGI animation techniques. It’s still rough in some areas, but there’s nothing detrimental.

Story: 6/10 | It’s such a nothing story for me. Didn’t dislike, wasn’t being bored by the story; it’s just bland, but good enough to keep eyeballs glued.

Characters: 1/10 | I don’t like anyone in this movie!

Acting: 7/10 | It’s a Pixar movie. Acting is always a strong suit even if here it's just a few standout performances instead of Toy Story, where it felt everyone was on their A game.

Music: 5/10 | I also do not care about the music, but it’s fine, I guess.

Final score: 5/10 | I really just don’t care for A Bug’s Life. It’s an interesting second outing for the, at the time, young studio still trying to find its defining trait, but there’s a reason this is very much overlooked when discussing Pixar films.

Fun Maddy note: Look up the film history regarding this movie and DreamWorks’ first outing Antz; it’s a very interesting story.

Fun Maddy note #2: The short that plays before this, Geri's Game, is a masterpiece.

David

Oft-forgotten in the Pixar canon, and as much as I hate to say it, I completely see why. I think this movie gave me nightmares the one time I watched it as a child and coming back to it 20-odd years down the line, I can at least say that hasn't happened - but not much else has changed. Unfortunately, I think my favorite part of this film is the short before it - which doesn't bode terribly well.

Aesthetic: Though it's better animated, which I'll note below, I actually think this movie was a step backwards design-wise. I think it may have been an effort to give us the bug's view of things, but it just Does Not Work here and instead I'm left thinking we've gone backwards.

Animation: Herky-jerky at times, but it's neat to see how techniques develop even within the short span of three years. It's a forward step from Toy Story here, if not anywhere else.

Story: Honestly, it was fine. I think it bolsters the film a bit because of where it drags elsewhere, but I don't want to promise anything as far as like "oh this is the best goddamn story I've ever seen in a Pixar movie" because that's objectively untrue. They did well thematically, though I think at times it got clogged and clunky, poorly paced throughout.

Characters: These annoying motherfuckers. There are like two likable-ish characters in the entire film, and it's a major disappointment especially coming off of Toy Story, where basically everyone is lovable in some sense.

Acting: People did their best with what they had to work with. Doesn't make it astounding in any sense, but I'm not gonna dig too hard on this one because at the end of the day I don't really think there were any issues with it.

Music: It exists? It's not memorable whatsoever, which is a ding on it for me.

Final score: It's a 5/10, and I've currently got it 15th of the 23 movies that I've seen (among the 25 total films). Struggles in important places just a bit too much for me to nudge it any higher, but I'm also not going to turn around and make allusions that this is the worst of these films, because to me it isn't. I think it's a step backwards for a young studio still trying to find their footing, and while they didn't fall, it was a definite slip that could've been really rough to come back from. Middling in almost every aspect.

Nik

I don’t have much of a precursor to this film. It was perhaps the Pixar movie I watched the least amount of times as Toy Story 2 was the one I really started with. It was frightening to me as a child.

Aesthetic: I do think that they went in with the best intentions to make it seem like the viewer is in the bugs world, but to me, I felt like I was in that Green Army Man game on the PlayStation 2.

Animation: For the wide array of bug movement I do think that the animators actually did a fantastic job. I remember being pretty amazed as a kid by the way the Heimlich moved on screen. It is easy to see the characters all simply as bugs, but the fact is, they all move differently and I can’t really fault them on this front.

Story: This may be some recency bias for me, but I really feel like this was one of the first kids’ movies I remember just being very unexcited about. Even as a kid I just remember it being the movie with the scary villain and it being boring. My rewatch confirmed this. It is paced a bit oddly and I feel a lot more effort went into the bug theme than the story itself.

Characters: I will refer back to my favorite caterpillar, Heimlich. I should actually say my former favorite caterpillar. On rewatch as an adult, he was sadly very annoying, and the rest of the cast is not much better. The main character does not feel fleshed out enough. It was hard to root for him.

Acting: Despite this movie being a bit forgotten in the Pixar lore, it still has an iconic voice cast. I do not mean to make light of any situation but the fact that Pixar's most frightening villain is voiced by Kevin Spacey is ominous to say the least. It is to be said, though, that the voice cast without him is still super iconic.

Music: Once again, I am not a huge music guy, and I cannot say any songs in this film were remotely familiar. I love Randy Newman’s music for the Toy Story setting, but there is something about his style that felt out of place.

Final score: 3/10 | This movie is one I can honestly say I may never watch again, unless it is for the reason of doing another Pixar rewatch in the future. It is unmemorable, the characters are annoying, and I really don’t think I can get the fact the main villain is Kevin Spacey out of my head, which is not Pixar’s fault. Even though I went in with optimism, the film disappointed.

Final notes

It’s worth noting that this was the first Pixar film that had a blooper reel running over the credits. Toy Story 2’s is a lot more well-known – iconic, even – but A Bug’s Life started the trend.

Through two films, all five of us currently have Toy Story in first and A Bug’s Life in second. We don’t think that’ll be too controversial.

Next up: Toy Story 2