Using their own ravishing brand of 3-D animation, the Pixar artists realize their characters so vividly and totally that no matter how old you are, the movie makes you feel as if you're fiddling with action figures in your head. You're charmed at the sight of the industrious food-gathering ants. You're amazed at the horrors of the grasshoppers who pilfer from them. You're amused and enchanted at the shenanigans of the oddball insects who side with the ants -- a traveling troupe of performers that includes a rhino beetle and a walking stick. When the wisecracks, plot twists and visual jokes fall into place and click, the result is convulsively entertaining. The moment when Slim the walking stick uses himself to define slapstick will remind the most morose stick-in-the-mud what it's like to be tickled all over.
A Bug's Life, a Disney release, focuses on a misfit ant who ends up saving his colony. So did Antz, the recent computer-generated cartoon made at the PDI studio for DreamWorks under the guidance of former Disney exec Jeffrey Katzenberg. That's where any similarity ends. Antz is a brown, limp Bananas (1971); it glues early Woody Allen comedy (and the voice of Allen) to a confused satire of working-class revolution and feeble burlesques of other movies, including those of DreamWorks honcho Steven Spielberg. The images in Antz are repetitive and claustrophobic even when the action takes place in the great outdoors.
A Bug's Life is the film that has the high-flying fancy of Spielberg at his E.T. (1982) best. (The earliest title for E.T. was A Boy's Life.) Flik (voice of Dave Foley), the enterprising ant at the heart of the movie, explodes the horizon of Ant Island in his quest to free ants from the menacing grasshoppers -- roustabouts who get loaded at a nearby bug cantina, then terrorize the ants into supplying them with more than half their harvest in an annual "offering" of nuts and grains. These 'hoppers are a cross between Hell's Angels and the peasant-bashing banditos Eli Wallach led in The Magnificent Seven (1960). Flik recruits his own Notorious Nine to combat them; unfortunately for the colony (if not for us), they turn out to be circus bugs, not gunslingers.
The Disney studio already fashioned this film's core story when it transformed Aesop's "The Grasshopper and the Ants" into a "Silly Symphony" short back in 1934. In its own corkscrew fashion, A Bug's Life is also based on the fable about the grasshopper who sings the summer away without storing food for the winter.
In A Bug's Life, directors John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton seduce the audience into adopting an ant's-eye view of the universe. The opening food-gathering sequence is witty and enthralling. In the light-streaked atmosphere of Ant Island, even the roughest surfaces shimmer. And the workers moving in single file to unload kernels of grain instantly captivate the audience. When an errant leaf blocks them, the line commander orders a trembling ant to stare at him while circling around it, like a counselor guiding a panicky camper across a rope bridge. The leaf, we're told, can't compare to the disastrous "Twig of '93."
The CinemaScope screen spills over with deep colors, balletic movements and recognizable yet quirky characterizations --none more indelible than the bad guys. There isn't a single melodious singer among them: The grasshoppers here are snarling scavengers. Their leader, Hopper (Kevin Spacey), ferociously defends his place in a Darwinian scheme -- birds eat grasshoppers, grasshoppers exploit (if not eat) ants. Flik, a would-be Young Tom Edison, must inspire the other ants to burrow out of their increasingly dangerous rut. Flik's appetite for fantasy and fun enables him to secure his colony's future.
A Bug's Life salutes the smart kid no one thinks is smart, and does so without putting down the rest of the colony. The Queen (Phyllis Diller) is a wise old ant who has her hands full calming Princess Atta (Julia Louis-Dreyfus) before the arrival of the grasshoppers. "It's the same every year," the Queen tells Atta, with the bored air of a hostess at an obligatory event. "They come, they eat, they leave."
This is the kind of picture that's in love with show biz -- like, say, Annie Get Your Gun (1950). But it's not a musical; it's a baggy-ants comedy. There are no gratuitous songs to goose the action. The film stays focused on Flik's efforts to recruit "tough bugs" to battle the grasshoppers. When Flik, in full hiking regalia, hitches a ride on a dandelion puff, he's got the same giddy combination of desperation, awkwardness and grace that Buster Keaton had when he hung on to a hot-air balloon in The Balloonatic (1923).
Lasseter has called this movie "truly an epic of miniature proportions." It's a spectacle with a cast of hundreds and a dozen and a half rounded characters. Because they keep their critters moving, the Pixar craftsmen minimize anything saccharine. The circus bugs are comic action figures descended from Chaplin as well as Keaton.
The Pixar team's supercharged enthusiasm acts as an aesthetic disinfectant even on characters who at first glance are too kitschy-koo, like Atta's kid sister Dot. She comes off as a little steam engine that can, thanks partly to Hayden Panettiere's piping vocal performance and partly to the Pixar team's own predilection for energetic myths-within-myths. Dot, Flik's biggest fan, is the ringleader of the Blueberries, an ant colony variation on the Brownies.
The youthful Pixar filmmakers are as confident and innovative as the Blueberries. Seventy years ago, when the talkies arrived, the silent comedians who are the Pixar artists' true mentors often couldn't adjust to the dense new world of picture and sound. But Lasseter and company are themselves the pioneers of a new digital age.
Lasseter and Stanton and the rest of the animators and gagsmiths use the computer with staggering imaginative freedom. It's as if their collective unconscious were the hard drive. They may need to see a movie as an assemblage of interlocking parts in order to channel their bounding creative energy. Even more than Toy Story, A Bug's Life is that archetypal American creation -- a lyrical contraption.
A Bug's Life.
Rated G.
Directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. With the voices of Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey and Julia Louis-Dreyfus.
