The Making of A Bug's Life
One of the most painfully underrated Pixar movies of all time is A Bug’s Life. It was the second Pixar film that was made just 3 years after Toy Story made its debut. The studio, after converting from a computer business to a computer animation business, experimented with short films first to see how they could perfect their skill each time. Once they felt like they had a good handle on how to create an immersive, full-length feature film, John Lasseter created Toy Story in 1995. Things progressed every year after that with computer animation, and the animators found ways to create full-length films in a cheaper and faster way. A staff of about 200 people came together to create A Bug’s Life, with the goal of making it bigger and better than Toy Story.
Flik and Dot in A Bug’s Life. Image from: https://wizarddojo.com/2015/05/07/a-bugs-life-review/
Animating A Bug’s Life
The story of A Bug’s Life somewhat wrote itself once it was decided that it would be about a small world where the leaves, the grass, the rocks, and the flowers would tower over our colony of ants. This idea was fleshed out during a lunch that Director John Lasseter, Co-Director and Writer Andrew Stanton, and Producers Darla Anderson and Kevin Reher had. Pixar drew inspiration from the famous Aesop fable “The Ant and the Grasshopper”, which is about a grasshopper begging an ant for food during the wintertime but getting rejected. Pixar used this story and turned it into a whole new immersive environment, with detailed characters and backstories that pull on the heartstrings of the audience.
“We went with bugs... a big multi-character story and we’ve just made a completely organic world, which is very difficult to do in computer animation.”
The Ant and the Grasshopper. Image from: http://read.gov/aesop/052.html
According to supervising technical director Eben Ostby, he said that working with Buzz and Woody was a challenge as both characters are quite complex, but facing the task of animating several more detailed lead characters in A Bug’s Life was even more challenging. One way to combat this obstacle was the technique of having the animators actually act out some scenes, much like Disney has always done with reference models. Once character designs were complete, background art was added, along with colour, texture, and lighting.
The World from an Ant’s Point of View
It didn’t take flying to a whole other country to do the research about the chosen location for the film, it took as little as stepping out into your backyard and getting low to the ground to see all of the details in the leaves, grass, and dirt. The team at Pixar spent a lot of time out in the nature, looking at the way leaves would naturally fall on the ground to create roofs and floors for ants, how the grass leans over to create a sheltered area, and how daring a trip across cracked mud would be for an ant. Many of the photos and videos that were taken for reference made it almost exactly as it was into the film. They also studied the bugs themselves, how the ants would carry things on their backs for that opening scene, how a beetles wings would fly for Dim, and how the ants and grasshoppers interacted.
“The thing, that probably more than anything else that we were inspired by, was the translucency of this world. Everything around you at this level that we found... when the sun shined through them it was like stained glass windows.”
A Bug’s Life concept art via Pixar. Image from: https://www.pixar.com/feature-films/a-bugs-life
The Characters of A Bug’s Life
The first thing an animation studio must do before even thinking about creating the whole movie is figuring out the character design and who will voice each character to make them come to life. Many of the characters started out looking slightly different than what we see on the big screen, mostly with their proportions. Hopper started out with a more triangular head and different shaped legs. Flik started out as a red ant, and his eyes and smile went through different changes. The characters that went through the most changes from their conception were Francis, Dim, and P.T Flea. The Queen, Rosie, and Princess Atta saw the least amount of changes. To have a better look at each character to finalize their designs, scale models of each one was made.
Original concept art of Flik via Pixar. Image from: https://www.pixar.com/feature-films/a-bugs-life
Original concept art of Rosie via Pixar. Image from: https://www.pixar.com/feature-films/a-bugs-life
Some of the challenges the animators ran into that they didn’t have to face during Toy Story was figuring out how insect legs would all move at different times to make it look more realistic, and how flapping wings would look on the screen without being blurry. These challenges were brought up during the creations of Rosie, Dim, and Gypsy. Every character went through a facial test to see how things like the wrinkles in their face, the corners of their mouths, and the closing of their eyelids all interacted with each other. This was a huge project in comparison to Toy Story, because once again, almost all of the A Bug’s Life characters were stars in this film.
The Voice Actors of A Bug’s Life
Our hero of the film, Flik, is voiced by Dave Foley. Foley was a stand-up comedian from Toronto, Ontario. He was a part of a sketch comedy group called The Kids in the Hall, whom also had their own television series from 1988 to 1995. He had worked on a few other television shows through the 1990s, and was approached to play Flik, to which he took as a surprise.
Princess Atta was voiced by Julia Louis-Dreyfus, who is best known for her work on Saturday Night Live and Elaine on Seinfeld. Julia was a huge fan of Toy Story, and wanted to be a part of what Pixar was working on next.
Phyllis Diller took on the role as The Queen, whom she did a reading for and got the part almost immediately afterward. Diller is a very popular comedian and actress, who starred in TV and movies from the 1950s until the 2010s. She is best known for her own show, The Phyllis Diller Show in 1966, and her work on The Night Gallery, The Love Boat, and The Bold and the Beautiful.
Hayden Panettiere played the role of Dot at only 10 years old. It was her first voice acting role ever, and she went on to have a very fruitful and productive life as an actress and voice actress. She is best known as Claire Bennet in the TV series Heroes, and as Juliette Barnes in the series Nashville.
Dot, Flik, and The Queen. Image from: https://heavy.com/streaming/2019/11/stream-a-bugs-life/
Other notable actors and actresses include David Hyde Pierce (Slim), best known for his leading role as Niles on the hit show Frasier, Disney screenwriter Joe Ranft (Heimlich), actor and comedian Denis Leary (Francis), long-time TV star Jonathan Harris (Manny), actress and singer Madeline Kahn (Gypsy), Pixar legend Bonnie Hunt (Rosie), Everybody Loves Raymond star Brad Garrett (Dim), and improvisational comedian Michael McShane (Tuck and Roll).
“We come up with these characters in drawings, like storyboards, and then we all provide voices for them when we’re pitching the boards. The directors asked me to be the real voice of him so I kind of lucked out there.”
A Bug’s Life circus bugs. Image from: https://disney.fandom.com/wiki/Circus_Bugs
The Release of A Bug’s Life and Antz
4 years and $120 million later, A Bug’s Life had its premiere at the El Capitan Theatre in Los Angeles on Saturday, November 14th, 1998. There was tension surrounding the release date, as competing animation studio DreamWorks was also releasing their newest animated film just one month prior to Pixar, and it was called Antz. There was a very public feud surrounding these 2 studios at the time, as both were making very similar movies. CEO of DreamWorks Jeffrey Katzenberg h ad just left working for the Walt Disney Studios, and formed DreamWorks partly out of spite. That’s when he went to Lasseter to ask about what they were working on… cue A Bug’s Life. Despite all of the drama, A Bug’s Life ended up beating Antz out of the box office, with a whopping $363.3 million in the box office.
A Bug’s Life vs Antz. Image from: https://www.moviefone.com/2018/11/14/pixar-bugs-life-antz-box-office-battle/
The legacy of A Bug’s Life lived on in A Bug’s Land, for children and families to enjoy for several years before it was closed for the Avengers Campus in 2018. Though it is one of the more underappreciated Pixar films, some of it’s elements, including director John Lasseter and actor Kevin Spacey have not aged well, it remains as a stepping stone toward the success of Pixar today.
Reference list:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z4Msedi5Ao0&t=6s
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A954nLusG3M
https://www.pixar.com/feature-films/a-bugs-life
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8M0k-e82bus
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fzmUEusZqxw