A BUG'S LIFE
A film review by Mark R. Leeper
Capsule: Our second animated ant film of the
season edges out the first for humor and actual
animation style. A BUG'S LIFE has a mediocre
story-line, seemingly derived from Kurosawa's SEVEN
SAMURAI, but its animation will dazzle the eye.
This film offers adults a little less plot and
characterization than did ANTZ, but the visuals are
better and jokes are funnier. Don't miss the
closing credit sequence. Rating: 7 (0 to 10), low
+2 (-4 to +4)
Let's get the expository lump out of the way at the beginning. All bugs are insects but not all insects are bugs. Bugs have tube-like mouthparts and wings that are joined to the body in a sort of thickened area. Scientists call them "Hemiptera." Ants, walking sticks, and certainly spiders are not bugs. And to further correct, ants have six legs as we saw in ANTZ (well, sort of), not four as portrayed in A BUG'S LIFE. And speaking of inaccuracies, in my review of ANTZ I said that Pixar and Disney might have to look to their laurels to match the animation quality of ANTZ. Well I was wrong; Pixar and Disney are doing just fine, thank you. A BUG'S LIFE actually is the more visually sophisticated of the two animated films, but each has far surpassed TOY STORY. There may be more animated figures in some scenes in ANTZ, but Pixar has the edge on life-like animation and in giving a three- dimensional look. They have also made some perceptive improvements in digital representation light and surface texture. Facial animation is also better. In fact looking at the faces of the grasshoppers as they talk, they really have more texture than a camera would pick up looking at a real grasshopper. They have gone into a kind of hyper-reality, much like the saturated Technicolor of musicals of the 50s created a sort of hyper-reality. But since people get a little squeamish looking too closely at real insects, Pixar seems to reserve this over-texturing for the villainous grasshoppers and there to make them a somewhat more repulsive foe.
Where A BUG'S LIFE has a problem is that it has a less sophisticated or interesting plot than either TOY STORY or ANTZ. The plot is directly or indirectly a rehash of the late Akira Kurosawa's SEVEN SAMURAI. The ants of Ant Island could live very well if they were not obliged to pay a heavy tribute of food each year to a ferocious band of grasshoppers. In the colony ant Flik has many ideas how to do things differently-he even has ideas for how to deal with the grasshoppers. The catch is that none of his ideas seems to work very well. Flik's idea for how to deal with the grasshoppers is to get bigger bugs to fight for the ant colony. So the colony decides to send someone to find defenders. And who do they choose? The ant they can most spare, Flik. Our intrepid ant finds defenders, but does not realize that they are not fighters but flea circus performers. With Flik's ideas and with the aid of what they think of as fighter insects, the colony prepares to defend itself against the cruel grasshoppers. The grasshopper leader is the nasty Hopper, voiced with real menace by Kevin Spacey.
It is tempting to compare this film's weaker plot but impressive visuals with the current trend of sci-fi films being taken over by special effects. But many respected classic films did much the same. Busby Berkley musicals had real visual style but had relatively bland and cliched plots. Then as so frequently now the entertainment was in what the audience saw, not what the film said.
It is worthwhile to see A BUG'S LIFE just to see how the animation technology is progressing. If the story- line is weak at least there are moments of really good humor, though many are in the closing credits. It would be interesting to know if ANTZ eats into the profits of A BUG'S LIFE. ANTZ seems to have been timed to do just that, but if so it may have been a miscalculation. The two films dealing with the one non- conformist ant in the colony could co-exist at the box-office much like DEEP IMPACT and ARMAGEDDON have.
I would rate A BUG'S LIFE a 7 on the 0 to 10 scale and a low +2 on the -4 to +4 scale. There are a few scenes that could be frightening to younger children.
This film has been released with the short film "Geri's Game" which won Pixar an Oscar. It is a funny little short of an old man playing chess with himself in the park. It humorously makes the point that playing chess with yourself as an opponent is not really like playing a different person. Actually it could almost be a study of schizophrenia, though I think that is reading more into the short than Pixar intends. One of the more interesting aspects of "Geri's Game" is to see how far Pixar has progressed in representing computer animation of human figures. It is one thing to represent in animation toys and insects with their rigid surfaces, but it is harder to represent humans realistically. Human characters were kept to a minimum in TOY STORY and are not present at all in A BUG'S LIFE.
I have one question about the closing credits. (Hopefully this will be meaningless to anyone who has not seen the film.) How genuine is what we are hearing? The joke is obviously that the visuals are false, but the audio track may be genuine.
Mark R. Leeper
mleeper@lucent.com
Copyright 1998 Mark R. Leeper
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