"Bug's" Has Legs

Cute insect adventure a visual delight


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WILD APPLAUSE A BUG'S LIFE: Animated adventure comedy. With the voices of Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey, Julia Louis-Drefus, Hayden Panettiere, Phyllis Dyler, Richard Kind, David Hyde Pierce, Joe Ranft, Denis Leary. Directed by John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton. (G. 94 minutes. At Bay Area theaters.)


Give it six thumbs up and a crawling ovation!

``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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