How do you do,
It's winter and the "Going Twenty" phase will end now with Disney and Pixar's A Bug's Life. A Bug's Life was the successful follow up film of Pixar in wake of Toy Story, the film that struck it rich in being a completely computer animated movie. Toy Story appealed to all ages when it came out in 1995; adults enjoyed the intelligent story telling and dialogue while children were delighted by the film's fantasy and adventure elements. Toy Story was even rated among the top ten films of the year when it came out, and is on the list of 100 greatest American films of all time, along with Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the latter was a breakthrough in traditional hand drawn animation.
While it was in production for the anticipated Toy Story 2, Pixar attempted another follow up in what was practically a tough act to follow. But, they pulled it off in 1998 with A Bug's Life, where the film centers on arthropods interacting. It wasn't a real technological leap of anything at all. The real breakthrough was Toy Story, which was to bring toys to life on the big screen with computers. Everything after that focused more on the story telling elements, just as Disney did in everything after Snow White. A Bug's Life permitted new ways to explore this new form of animation and allow Pixar to have a bigger scope to things, whereas Toy Story was the technological leap to get computer graphics in motion. That can explain why this movie has a better story than Toy Story. The projects to come also allowed writers to develop their characters more, considering how Toy Story largely centers around Woody and Buzz and have all the other toys in the background. In A Bug's Life, we have a protagonist in Flick, but we also have other characters with their own conflicts, their own plots, and their own resolutions.
Of course, Pixar rarely does much original with its stories. A Bug's Life is basically a rewrite of The Three Amigos, which in turn uses plot elements from The Magnificent Seven, which is an Americanized version of The Seven Samurai. I wouldn't call it stealing from any of them; A Bug's Life is merely retelling an old story in a new way, which is itself not that old.
In the days before writing, stories were told aloud and what was told got passed down to the next generation. Some were preserved the same all through the ages while others borrowed elements from the world and incorporated them into the narrative. Then came the invention of writing and stories could now be preserved in print. As people began to move around, they encountered other stories in other cultures and elements would sometimes be borrowed in making new stories. For example, Ancient Greece had Homer's epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which inspired the Roman poet, Virgil, to write The Aeneid. Later, in the Middle Ages, you can find great works that use Christian influences and Biblical themes combined with tropes from a pre-Christian era and create something with it. It continued on: Blake took inspirations from John Milton's Paradise Lost, Dickens' A Christmas Carol is greatly influenced by Shakespeare's plays, and Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes uses the inverted species order that Jonathan Swift featured in his Gulliver's Travels (which also inspired Dr. Seuss' "The Butter Battle Book").
A Bug's Life uses the same basic story line of the previous films, being that a village is terrorized by bandits and a group of heroes are called upon to protect it. In the Kurosawa film, the samurai are treated as the Japanese version of the Medieval knight in Europe, where they sacrifice their lives to protect people from evil, though the image is a romanticized version at best. In reality, the samurai of Feudal Japan were more like Luca Brazi of The Godfather than Sir Lancelot of the King Arthur legends, the strongmen in service of their lords. If we are to use Star Wars, since the Jedi are said to be inspired by samurai warriors, the real ones would lean more toward Darth Maul, Darth Vader, or even Kylo Ren more than they would as Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Luke Skywalker. Yet, the romantic image is what is used in the movie and is passed to the cowboys in The Magnificent Seven, another figure of a man who is often glamorized and romanticized in Hollywood as a symbol of chivalry. Considering from reading books about the Old West, the American cowboys were not modern day Sir Lancelots; they were mostly hired hands on ranches who drove cattle across trails and came to town after work where they sometimes got out of line with the law. The Magnificent Seven adds something of the Americans rescuing others trope where Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen enlist five others to help them beat Mexican bandits who terrorize a Mexican village. Of course, both it and the Japanese movie are depicted as tragedies in the fight as half of the group is cut down and both have someone lamenting that the helpless farmers were the actual winners.
Fast forward to the eighties with The Three Amigos where some of the tropes that made The Magnificent Seven great in the sixties has been challenged and reevaluated. Revisionism on the Punitive Expedition brought on by Vietnam introduced the trope of the Anglo Americans getting into places he clearly doesn't belong and the tradition hero worship is nothing but the White Messiah trope. The Three Amigos is not very heavy handed on it, but it uses this by reducing the seven warriors down to three, and the plot twist is they are not really gun slinging heroes but simply actors brought in on false pretenses. When they meet the big bad, the cover is blown and the results are disgraceful, but in the end they decide between being phonies back home and phonies in another country it would be better to be the latter and they help the villagers win out.
All that finds its way into A Bug's Life, replacing the Mexican banditos with grasshoppers, the villagers with a colony of ants, and the three Anglo American actors turned saviors into circus bugs. Another older story inspired the movie, of course.
You may have heard of the fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper", how the grasshopper "fiddled" away summer while the ant and his pals worked in collecting the harvest. When winter came, the grasshopper is cold and hungry, and begs the ants for food and shelter, to which the ants refuse. Aesop's original message was harsh, which explains how retellings, including Disney's cartoon "The Grasshopper and the Ants" would feature a change in which the ants do welcome the grasshopper in who repents of his previous stance and earns his keep by entertaining the ants with his music. The fable is still used to illustrate the benefits of working to prepare for thin times during the thick and how idleness wastes away the thick times and leaves on unprepared.
A Bug's Life appears to add another twist: suppose the children of the grasshopper took advantage of the hospitality of the children of the ants and set themselves up to rule over the latter. Now the ants stock up the food to offer as protection tokens to grasshoppers who claim to be their protection against other bugs. Thus, we have a connection to other three movies mentioned above.
One thing that people have caught on during the years is the film's anti-authority message. When the grasshoppers question the need to return to the ants after having enough food, their leader, Hopper brings up that Flick, the hero, has stood up to him. So how does one ant matter to him? He illustrates it well in this scene. The grasshoppers hold a whole colony hostage and if their control ends, the grasshoppers could be overwhelmed. In short, it's all about power.
The message of the conflict between Flick and Hopper is basically the people in power are vastly outnumbered, and often weak without support of the people, and the masses could overthrow them all, and they know it, so the powers that be will maintain their power using means of fear and keeping groups divided so as to avoid a united mob coming after them. One thing they fear most is when one person stands up to them, the entire population will, thus examples must be made to maintain that power. Consider historic examples, like the Nazis in Germany, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and you can see it done before; and some might think the same with the US today where certain elements are in charge and use fear mongering (and political correctness) to keep everyday Americans in line. Hopper understands that and will do everything to keep that power (one telling example is the way he threatens harm to his younger and less smart brother, Molt).
In the end, the masses do revolt, and the circus bugs assist. Other subplots include Princess Dot wanting to be taken seriously, Flik's progressive ideas of invention while ants stubbornly hold to traditional ways, and the circus bugs' arc of redemption after losing their jobs happen as well. Plenty of the humor is the way how the circus bugs try to hype up and subvert stereotypes to their specie. For example, Francis the Ladybug can be relatable to those gender fluid sorts since we all assume ladybugs are female. The same with Rosie the Spider, a black widow (who jokingly talks of the deaths of her husband at one point) who is suppose to be a deadly arachnid and yet hangs with the others like it's no problem. Heimlich the Caterpillar even makes one think of the children's book "The Hungry Caterpillar" with his eating habits. Meanwhile, Manny is a praying mantis who is introduced in meditation (instead of praying) and P.T. Flea (named for P.T. Barnum, the guy they made a musical on) who owns a circus, both in reference to his namesake (and he even looks like Barnum) and the fact people have flea circuses.
Other cases of artistic license are made. For one, real life ants have nests made mostly of female, technically, while males like Flik would have wings and exist mainly to mate with the Queen, whose daughters make up the workers. Flik is made a worker ant, and a male, and given a romantic subplot with Princess Atta, who becomes queen in the end. Others include the way they humanize insects by making them walk on two legs and have arms like people while spiders are generally depicted with six legs (sort of a way to make them out as monsters). Yet, pill bugs have more than six legs and are shown in the movie too. One thing that could have worked with the circus is if Rosie had a scorpion friend, the pill bugs replaced by a centipede and a millipede, and maybe a crab for the strong guy, then the circus would have all the groups of the Arthropod phylum represented. Of course, as most people are aware, not all arthropods are bugs.
While the story is recycled, the film A Bug's Life has the legacy of making Pixar a household name, doing more so than Toy Story did. With its success, Pixar was able to create not only the sequel to Toy Story but also such hits as WALL-E, Up, and Cars. In each case, we see many motifs and tropes of older stories regenerated into new tales.
It really is a fun movie to watch; even someone who is not into bugs would agree.
While it was in production for the anticipated Toy Story 2, Pixar attempted another follow up in what was practically a tough act to follow. But, they pulled it off in 1998 with A Bug's Life, where the film centers on arthropods interacting. It wasn't a real technological leap of anything at all. The real breakthrough was Toy Story, which was to bring toys to life on the big screen with computers. Everything after that focused more on the story telling elements, just as Disney did in everything after Snow White. A Bug's Life permitted new ways to explore this new form of animation and allow Pixar to have a bigger scope to things, whereas Toy Story was the technological leap to get computer graphics in motion. That can explain why this movie has a better story than Toy Story. The projects to come also allowed writers to develop their characters more, considering how Toy Story largely centers around Woody and Buzz and have all the other toys in the background. In A Bug's Life, we have a protagonist in Flick, but we also have other characters with their own conflicts, their own plots, and their own resolutions.
Of course, Pixar rarely does much original with its stories. A Bug's Life is basically a rewrite of The Three Amigos, which in turn uses plot elements from The Magnificent Seven, which is an Americanized version of The Seven Samurai. I wouldn't call it stealing from any of them; A Bug's Life is merely retelling an old story in a new way, which is itself not that old.
In the days before writing, stories were told aloud and what was told got passed down to the next generation. Some were preserved the same all through the ages while others borrowed elements from the world and incorporated them into the narrative. Then came the invention of writing and stories could now be preserved in print. As people began to move around, they encountered other stories in other cultures and elements would sometimes be borrowed in making new stories. For example, Ancient Greece had Homer's epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, which inspired the Roman poet, Virgil, to write The Aeneid. Later, in the Middle Ages, you can find great works that use Christian influences and Biblical themes combined with tropes from a pre-Christian era and create something with it. It continued on: Blake took inspirations from John Milton's Paradise Lost, Dickens' A Christmas Carol is greatly influenced by Shakespeare's plays, and Pierre Boulle's Planet of the Apes uses the inverted species order that Jonathan Swift featured in his Gulliver's Travels (which also inspired Dr. Seuss' "The Butter Battle Book").
A Bug's Life uses the same basic story line of the previous films, being that a village is terrorized by bandits and a group of heroes are called upon to protect it. In the Kurosawa film, the samurai are treated as the Japanese version of the Medieval knight in Europe, where they sacrifice their lives to protect people from evil, though the image is a romanticized version at best. In reality, the samurai of Feudal Japan were more like Luca Brazi of The Godfather than Sir Lancelot of the King Arthur legends, the strongmen in service of their lords. If we are to use Star Wars, since the Jedi are said to be inspired by samurai warriors, the real ones would lean more toward Darth Maul, Darth Vader, or even Kylo Ren more than they would as Qui-Gon Jinn, Obi-Wan Kenobi, or Luke Skywalker. Yet, the romantic image is what is used in the movie and is passed to the cowboys in The Magnificent Seven, another figure of a man who is often glamorized and romanticized in Hollywood as a symbol of chivalry. Considering from reading books about the Old West, the American cowboys were not modern day Sir Lancelots; they were mostly hired hands on ranches who drove cattle across trails and came to town after work where they sometimes got out of line with the law. The Magnificent Seven adds something of the Americans rescuing others trope where Yul Brynner and Steve McQueen enlist five others to help them beat Mexican bandits who terrorize a Mexican village. Of course, both it and the Japanese movie are depicted as tragedies in the fight as half of the group is cut down and both have someone lamenting that the helpless farmers were the actual winners.
Fast forward to the eighties with The Three Amigos where some of the tropes that made The Magnificent Seven great in the sixties has been challenged and reevaluated. Revisionism on the Punitive Expedition brought on by Vietnam introduced the trope of the Anglo Americans getting into places he clearly doesn't belong and the tradition hero worship is nothing but the White Messiah trope. The Three Amigos is not very heavy handed on it, but it uses this by reducing the seven warriors down to three, and the plot twist is they are not really gun slinging heroes but simply actors brought in on false pretenses. When they meet the big bad, the cover is blown and the results are disgraceful, but in the end they decide between being phonies back home and phonies in another country it would be better to be the latter and they help the villagers win out.
All that finds its way into A Bug's Life, replacing the Mexican banditos with grasshoppers, the villagers with a colony of ants, and the three Anglo American actors turned saviors into circus bugs. Another older story inspired the movie, of course.
You may have heard of the fable "The Ant and the Grasshopper", how the grasshopper "fiddled" away summer while the ant and his pals worked in collecting the harvest. When winter came, the grasshopper is cold and hungry, and begs the ants for food and shelter, to which the ants refuse. Aesop's original message was harsh, which explains how retellings, including Disney's cartoon "The Grasshopper and the Ants" would feature a change in which the ants do welcome the grasshopper in who repents of his previous stance and earns his keep by entertaining the ants with his music. The fable is still used to illustrate the benefits of working to prepare for thin times during the thick and how idleness wastes away the thick times and leaves on unprepared.
A Bug's Life appears to add another twist: suppose the children of the grasshopper took advantage of the hospitality of the children of the ants and set themselves up to rule over the latter. Now the ants stock up the food to offer as protection tokens to grasshoppers who claim to be their protection against other bugs. Thus, we have a connection to other three movies mentioned above.
One thing that people have caught on during the years is the film's anti-authority message. When the grasshoppers question the need to return to the ants after having enough food, their leader, Hopper brings up that Flick, the hero, has stood up to him. So how does one ant matter to him? He illustrates it well in this scene. The grasshoppers hold a whole colony hostage and if their control ends, the grasshoppers could be overwhelmed. In short, it's all about power.
The message of the conflict between Flick and Hopper is basically the people in power are vastly outnumbered, and often weak without support of the people, and the masses could overthrow them all, and they know it, so the powers that be will maintain their power using means of fear and keeping groups divided so as to avoid a united mob coming after them. One thing they fear most is when one person stands up to them, the entire population will, thus examples must be made to maintain that power. Consider historic examples, like the Nazis in Germany, the Bolsheviks in Russia, and you can see it done before; and some might think the same with the US today where certain elements are in charge and use fear mongering (and political correctness) to keep everyday Americans in line. Hopper understands that and will do everything to keep that power (one telling example is the way he threatens harm to his younger and less smart brother, Molt).
In the end, the masses do revolt, and the circus bugs assist. Other subplots include Princess Dot wanting to be taken seriously, Flik's progressive ideas of invention while ants stubbornly hold to traditional ways, and the circus bugs' arc of redemption after losing their jobs happen as well. Plenty of the humor is the way how the circus bugs try to hype up and subvert stereotypes to their specie. For example, Francis the Ladybug can be relatable to those gender fluid sorts since we all assume ladybugs are female. The same with Rosie the Spider, a black widow (who jokingly talks of the deaths of her husband at one point) who is suppose to be a deadly arachnid and yet hangs with the others like it's no problem. Heimlich the Caterpillar even makes one think of the children's book "The Hungry Caterpillar" with his eating habits. Meanwhile, Manny is a praying mantis who is introduced in meditation (instead of praying) and P.T. Flea (named for P.T. Barnum, the guy they made a musical on) who owns a circus, both in reference to his namesake (and he even looks like Barnum) and the fact people have flea circuses.
Other cases of artistic license are made. For one, real life ants have nests made mostly of female, technically, while males like Flik would have wings and exist mainly to mate with the Queen, whose daughters make up the workers. Flik is made a worker ant, and a male, and given a romantic subplot with Princess Atta, who becomes queen in the end. Others include the way they humanize insects by making them walk on two legs and have arms like people while spiders are generally depicted with six legs (sort of a way to make them out as monsters). Yet, pill bugs have more than six legs and are shown in the movie too. One thing that could have worked with the circus is if Rosie had a scorpion friend, the pill bugs replaced by a centipede and a millipede, and maybe a crab for the strong guy, then the circus would have all the groups of the Arthropod phylum represented. Of course, as most people are aware, not all arthropods are bugs.
While the story is recycled, the film A Bug's Life has the legacy of making Pixar a household name, doing more so than Toy Story did. With its success, Pixar was able to create not only the sequel to Toy Story but also such hits as WALL-E, Up, and Cars. In each case, we see many motifs and tropes of older stories regenerated into new tales.
It really is a fun movie to watch; even someone who is not into bugs would agree.
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