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 Woody 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 Aesop and the Disney short, the grasshopper begs the ants for provisions when the weather changes. The self-reliant ants may be the moral center of the tale, but the grasshopper wins the audience's sympathy. My fondest memory of the Disney cartoon is the antihero warbling "The World Owes Me a Living."
But 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. It's not as if you're over the rainbow; it's more like you're inside a rainbow. 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."
Arriving in time for Thanksgiving, A Bug's Life is a celluloid horn of plenty. 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. He inadvertently sabotages their yearly offering to the grasshoppers when he experiments with a self-made harvester. But this crisis ultimately loosens up the food chain. Aesop's original story asks us to control our impulse to play, but that concept is Greek to the makers of A Bug's Life. Flik's appetite for fantasy and fun enables him to secure his colony's future.
