A Bug's Life (1998)
Directed by John Lasseter
On behalf of "oppressed bugs everywhere," an inventive ant named Flik hires a troupe of warrior bugs to defend his bustling colony from a horde of freeloading grasshoppers led by the evil-minded Hopper.
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What critics compared A Bug's Life to
It echoes forest-battle tropes from FernGully and Avatar and boasts a visual palette reminiscent of A Bug's Life.
Christoph Waltz plays the villain perfectly and deliciously, reminiscent of Kevin Spacey’s turn as an evil grasshopper in “A Bug’s Life” from 15 years ago.
Taking characters from William Joyce children’s novel about “Leaf Men” and “Brave Good Bugs,” a team of writers has borrowed from “Antz” and “A Bug’s Life,” and even “Spiderwicke Chronicles” for a story about the fairy forces of life in a forest, the Leaf Men (and women) and their allies, in battle with the rotting reptilian bog-dwelling forces of decay.
If you like this, try: “Robots,” “Ferngully,” and “A Bug’s Life” and the books by William Joyce.
Though technology has made massive leaps in the 15 years since A Bug’s Life, this tiny-creature toon can’t muster anything like the Pixar classic’s sense of wonder at seeing the minute made massive.
That could be the implicit message of all the animated pictures predicated on the tiny, from A Bug's Life to The Secret World of Arietty.
It began in 1998, when Disney released ''A Bug's Life'' and DreamWorks came out with ''Antz,'' two movies that were nearly identical in their looks and themes.
The look of the film will be familiar to anyone who's seen the Toy Story movies, Antz or A Bug's Life, but Shrek does qualify as the first digitally animated movie to feature a large number of humans, who unfortunately still move with the stiffness of video game characters.
Here at least, if nowhere else, Shrek readily surpasses the Toy Story movies, as well as Antz (which it surpasses in other ways also) and Pixar’s A Bug’s Life (which is probably otherwise about its equal).
It also temporarily takes the mantle of best-looking, all-CGI animated feature, surpassing the likes of Toy Story and A Bug’s Life in the appearance category.
Although it reportedly makes technological advances in the art of computer animation, "Shrek" isn't nearly as visually pleasing as the Pixar/Disney collaborations (the "Toy Story" duo, "A Bug's Life").
In 1999 Katzenberg (now sitting pretty as the K in DreamWorks SKG, with new partners Steven Spielberg and David Geffen) won a long-in-the-courts $250 million suit against Disney for breach of contract, and just the year before that, the studios released dueling bug-movies, DreamWorks’s Ants and Disney’s A Bug’s Life.
It also has the dishonor of being the studio’s first real creative stumble since 1998’s A Bug’s Life .
But for the Pixar Animation crew it’s just another number in their unbelievable string of hits: “Toy Story” (1995), “A Bug’s Life” (1998), “Toy Story 2” (1999), “Monsters, Inc.” (2001), “Finding Nemo” (2003), “The Incredibles” (2004), “Cars” (2006), “Ratatouille” (2007), “WALL-E” (2008), “Up” (2009), “Toy Story 3” (2010), “Cars 2” (2011) . . .
There have been boy toys ("Toy Story"), boy bugs ("A Bug's Life"), boy beasts ("Monsters, Inc.") and even boy robots ("WALL-E").
Between "A Bug's Life," "Antz," "The Ant Bully," and the others, the concept has been done to death.
The plot is one part “A Bug’s Life,” and one part… courtroom drama.
For every Antz , there's a much better A Bug's Life .
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Watching How to Train Your Dragon 2, you’re reminded of the thrill you felt when you saw your first computer-animated movie, be it Toy Story or A Bug’s Life or even the forgettable Antz.
It started all the way back in 1998 when Eric Darnell and Tim Johnson's Antz came out just one month before John Lasseter’s A Bug's Life , and movie-goers have been drawing lines between projects ever since – from Shark Tale (2004) vs. Finding Nemo (2003), to Megamind (2010) vs.
Released in 2006, the computer-animated feature directed by John Lasseter (who previously directed “A Bug’s Life” and the first two “Toy Story” films) had a lot of heart.
The beauty of movies like Toy Story and A Bug’s Life (1998) and Finding Nemo (2003) is that they reimagine elements of our own world in a way that makes the familiar fantastical and funny and whimsical; after seeing those films, you can never look at a child’s doll or an anthill or a coral reef the same way again.
Lasseter has also directed “Toy Story 2” and “A Bug’s Life”.
…advertisement | advertise on newsday 'Cars 2' director has auto motives John Lasseter directed the first all-computer-generated feature film, 1995's "Toy Story," as well as 1998's "A Bug's Life," 1999's " Toy Story 2 " and the original "Cars" movie in 2006.
And let us not forget that that is exactly what Pixar used to make: A Bug's Life and Monsters, Inc. and even, really, the first Toy Story are all kids' movies.
In the accompanying featurette, the film's co-writer and co-director, John Lasseter ("Toy Story 1 and 2," "A Bug's Life") explains that the virtual abandonment of the America's celebrated Route 66 got him thinking about the story idea (so much so, apparently, that he originally wanted to title his movie "Route 66").
It's got something to do with the lack of a human grounding: the only other time Pixar stumbled was with its similarly bleak A Bug's Life (that picture resorting, like Cars, to racial caricature as its primary tentpole), which is also the only other time the company has neglected to ground its story with homo sapien ballast.
Filmmaker John Lasseter, who directed "A Bug's Life" and both "Toy Story" productions, thinks that the NASCAR in-jokes and quirky peripheral details (such as jet trails in the sky being tire marks) can compensate for the lack of a compelling plot.
Unlike, say, "A Bug's Life," which ingeniously gave pop culture the entomological treatment, "Cars" simply substitutes various makes and models for character types.
This is the first Pixar movie (although you could make a similar case for A Bug's Life) where the presented animated world could completely stand in for the human world because no direct points of reference to actual humans exist.
Specializing themselves in the anthropomorphism of everything from toys ( Toy Story ) to bugs ("A Bug's Life") and fish ( Finding Nemo ), the famed but slightly overrated animation studios give the same treatment to cars in, well, "Cars".
A Bug's Life is visually splendid, evocative of the romantic monumentalism of John Ford (and, of course, Akira Kurosawa's chief influence is Ford), particularly in an opening pastoral and a mist-shrouded reveal, with numerous images and references that presage the flat-brilliance of Pixar's The Searchers redux Toy Story 2; the cult of childhood of Monsters Inc. ; and the cathedral lighting, water effects, and parallel construction of Finding Nemo .
There are dozens of nods to favorite films — Star Wars, 2001, even Pixar’s own A Bug’s Life.)
Like its predecessor and the even better "A Bug's Life" - both directed by John Lasseter and made by Disney and Pixar - this sequel aspires to the boundlessness of a kid's imagination by forging a galaxy that confirms what, as a child, I always suspected about my toys: that they had feelings and personal narratives that came to life when I left my bedroom.
The many individuals who worked on the film have created the best computer-generated effects yet; the film looks much better than the first Toy Story, Antz, and A Bug's Life.
Whether it be the first "Toy Story" or last year's "A Bug's Life," to see a Pixar film is to know that the comedy will be as smart as the visuals are impressive.
The studio’s early features were silly movies about plastic cowboys (“Toy Story”) and insects (“A Bug’s Life”), and now, like a grad student with a bong, skew toward metaphysical explorations of human emotions (“Inside Out”) and the afterlife (“Coco”).
Though films such as "Toy Story," "A Bug's Life," "Toy Story 2," "Monsters, Inc." and "Wall-E" are tough to compete with, director and co-screenwriter Pete Docter, a Pixar veteran who had a credit on all those films, was able to push "Up" into the pantheon.
In Monsters, Inc., Pixar Studios’ fourth feature after Toy Story (1995), A Bug’s Life (1998), and Toy Story 2 (1999), Larson’s joke is taken to the next level, where the monsters are not only fully aware of the kid on top of the bed, but need that kid to maintain their way of life.
It outdoes A Bug’s Life for Pixar magic and outdoes Chicken Run (from Wallace and Gromit creator Nick Parks) for zany invention.
This movie has the same delicious mixture of heart, humor, and technical wizardry that made A Bug's Life and the two Toy Story movies into instant classics.
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It’s hard to shake the feeling that story masterminds Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Jonah Hill would have been better served by a more free-form narrative, something closer to “A Scanner Darkly” than “A Bug’s Life,” but “Sausage Party” was surely hard enough to get financed as it is.
Taken from a Pixar plot perspective, this movie about self-aware food in a supermarket mashes the existential queries of “Toy Story” with the stand-your-ground pride of “A Bug’s Life.”
From the Toy Story films to A Bug's Life to Monsters Inc. to Finding Nemo, the studio has consistently discovered new worlds with computer animation and matched the quality of their stories to those settings.