Like the Queen says, “They come, they eat, they leave. Governed by an elderly Queen (Phyllis Diller) and her daughter, the nervous Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus), the colony has a routine: Every summer, they give a large portion of their food to a group of grasshoppers, led by the sinister Hopper (Kevin Spacey, in what would prove to be a fittingly sinister role), as payment for being left alone. As an ant - an insect heavily associated with groupthink - Flik frequently commits the worst offense possible: going against the grain (literally). More specifically, it focuses on colony member Flik (Dave Foley), a misfit who Owen Gleiberman called a “renegade-nerd hero” in his 1998 review for Entertainment Weekly. Whatever Pixar’s intentions, and despite critics’ hang-ups, A Bug’s Life offers viewers a powerful anti-capitalist message. Dreamed up at the famous 1994 Pixar lunch where John Lasseter, Andrew Stanton, Joe Ranft, and Pete Docter also sketched out Monsters, Inc., Finding Nemo, and Wall-E, the film is at once a story about a misfit’s struggle to fit in and a yarn about.
HOPPER BUGS LIFE FULL
But it’s also full of hidden depths and far from harmless. Based on Aesop’s “ The Ant and the Grasshopper,” A Bug’s Life is, as Vulture puts it, charming. But while the first critique holds true - everything about computer animation has improved since the late ‘90s, from rendering to lighting - the second has always puzzled me. Most Pixar lists echo these same criticisms, focussing on A Bug’s Life’s outdated animation and simple, less “meaty” story.
HOPPER BUGS LIFE MOVIE
Placing A Bug’s Life 18th, Thrillist calls the movie a “straight adventure” that “doesn’t glow like Pixar’s emotionally meaty movies.” Vulture puts the film in 19th place, deeming it a “charming, ultimately harmless little tale.”
The cartoon holds the 16th spot on Rotten Tomatoes’ definitive tally of the studio’s films.
Within these lists - and there are many - you will almost always find Pixar’s second feature, A Bug’s Life (1998), among the duds. Ranked lists of Pixar’s 24 films are fixtures of the internet. In which bugs attain class consciousness following their parent company’s commercial success and IPO.
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