``A Bug's Life'' is one of the great movies -- a triumph of
storytelling and character development, and a whole new ballgame for
computer animation. Pixar Animation Studios has raised the genre to
an astonishing new level.
This warm, rollicking movie features a computer-created world that
looks breathtakingly natural, with wonderfully realized organic
textures, depth of field, shadings and an
amusing bug's-eye point of view. It all adds up to a terrific
entertainment for kids that doesn't talk down to adults either.
The main character, Flik (voice of ``NewsRadio's'' Dave
Foley), is a young freethinker in a closed society, an ant colony on
a tiny island. Each harvest time, a gang of bullying grasshoppers,
led by the swaggering Hopper (Kevin Spacey), extorts food from the
ant colony. It's a flipped-over variation of the Aesop fable ``The
Grasshopper and the Ant.''
The grasshoppers are like the bikers in ``The Wild One.''
When Hopper snarls, ``Let's fly,'' the grasshoppers rev up and become
a roaring crowd of Harley gangsters. It's a riotous conceit.
Other key ant characters are pert Princess Atta (Julia
Louis-Dreyfus), a button-cute Princess Dot (Hayden Panettiere) and
the Queen (Phyllis Diller), always clutching her lap pet, a green
aphid. The ants have two legs and two arms, with three fingers. And
adorable faces.
Flik is a well-meaning nerd, a gadgeteer. When one of his
harvesting contraptions goes awry and destroys the food intended for
the grasshoppers, all heck breaks out. Hopper demands a second
offering of food ``by the time the last leaf'' of autumn falls. The
colony, exhausted, panics.
Flik says he'll venture to the outside world for help, a
scheme the colonists agree to as a way of banishing him. In a
spectacular aerial sequence, Flik plucks a dandelion spore and floats
into the great unknown, though it's only a dry little creekbed in
human terms.
In a somewhat jarring shift, the story then turns to a troupe
of artistes in a flea circus. More wonderful characters are
introduced -- Slim (David Hyde Pierce) is a stick bug, Heimlich
(Pixar's Joe Ranft) a chubby caterpillar clown, Francis (Denis Leary)
a guy lady bug with
attitude, Manny (Jonathan Harris) a mantis, Gypsy (Madeline Kahn) a
moth and Rosie (Bonnie Hunt) is a black widow with a heart of gold.
Also in the flea circus are a funny nonsense-speaking pair of
Hungarian pill bug acrobats (voiced by Michael McShane), not to
mention circus leader P.T. Flea (John Ratzenberger).
What ``A Bug's Life'' does with this troupe is inspired. The actors
are thrown out of work by a circus mishap, and Flik mistakes them for
a band of mercenary warriors. They, in turn, believe that Flik is
hiring them to put on a show.
The greatest menace to the bug realm is a groundling
sparrow that looms like a monster. The Pixar artists made the bird
move much faster than the average movie monster, and it's a brilliant
stroke.
Another visual highlight is Flik's arrival in a
Manhattanlike city that, when the camera draws back, is nothing more
than a fly-
infested trash dump outside a trailer park. Crowd scenes with
big-eyed ants are pure magic.
The film is filled with so many sight and verbal gags
it calls for repeat viewing to catch all the details. But the movie
also plays like an epic set in a Wild West landscape, an atmosphere
smartly enhanced by Randy Newman's Coplandesque score.
Also, audiences get treated to Oscar-winning ``Geri's
Game'' by Pixar's Jan Pinkava as an opening short. And whatever you
do, don't leave the theater until the lights come on -- ``A Bug's
Life'' has some of the funniest end-credit outtakes ever.
This article appeared on page D - 1 of the San Francisco Chronicle
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