Ah, so underrated.

You know, I expected better reviews for a Pixar film - and an earlier one no less! This film is another Pixar classic.

The animation was quite good, except some of the bugs looked like plastic. But the grasshoppers - they were amazing! It was some of the best character modeling I've ever seen.

As for the story, it was the most original one in Pixar history - in fact, I can't think of an unoriginal Pixar story. All in all, this is a good movie, obviously. Go watch it. Have fun.

In my opinion it's better than "Antz", but that doesn't make it great, it still has some problems. What I can highlight is the quality of the animation, which is no surprise coming from Pixar. Overall, it has some likeable characters, which is more than I can say about its direct competition: "Antz". If you haven't watched it yet, you probably should. It is not extraordinary, but it is still an enjoyable film.

I'm not much of a bug fan, but Disney can make me like anything.

I enjoyed watching this movie. It was fun and funny! Yay!!!

Just one thing that keeps poking at me. I'm a perfectionist and prefer some things to be proportional. In real life, I don't thing that common ants would be as big as a lady bug, or a sow bug being half the size of the ant. But that's a little thing so nevermind!

Daaaaannng, this film is waaay underrated.
Only one 4-star rating. What a shame. Oh well, I'll give it a 4 star rating also since this is one of my favorite animated movies.

This film, like all Pixar films, is great. Great charcaters, lots of laughs, cool action scenes, and Hopper is one of the greatest villans of all time.

I really don't get why everone is not giving this 4 or even 3.5 stars. It's so much better, both in animation quality and story quality, the Antz.

I recommend this film for all ages.

A Bug's Life was cute, had a good moral and all but it is one of Pixar's weaker films. The animation was great, like it was in Toy Story, if not just a little better. The soundtrack by Newman, who also scored Toy Story, was very good and fit the movie nicely. The characters were ok, but they didn't have a whole lot of depth to them. The plot was ok, better than most newer 3d movies, but weak for a Pixar film. Overall it's a neat film, but aimed at a younger audience for sure. I think it's good for at least one watch.

Pixar's second feature had the unenviable task of matching up not only with the revered Toy Story but with Dreamworks' similarly-themed animated feature debut Antz, released earlier in the same year.

The story concerns a group of hard-working ants who are forced to gather food for a biker gang-style group of grasshoppers. The hero of the story is Flik, who - after a misunderstanding - ends up recruiting a recently-fired circus troupe to save the ants from the grasshoppers. The gang of losers find themselves trying desperately to keep up the charade while anticipating the inevitable confrontation with Hopper and his gang.

The film was a critical success, but I can't shake the feeling that this is largely down to the novelty value that CGI movies and Pixar's house style had at the time. Right from the start I found the film lacking Toy Story's charm; the opening scenes in the ant colony don't have a Quixote-esque Buzz Lightyear, a curmudgeonly Mr. Potato Head or even a Jim Varney slinky dog thing. Instead, there's just a load of near-identical ants, most of them characterised as cyphers: a well-meaning motherly queen, a perky teenage princess, her "but moooooooooom" kid sister and an aphid that acts like a dog. Only Flik holds any interest; of course, he's the main character, so he'd dang well better.

Later on, more successful characters are introduced. Aside from the circus insects, there's Hopper, leader of the grasshopper gang. While Pixar wisely avoided putting a standard cartoon villain in Toy Story, A Bugs Life benifits considerably from this guy. Hopper (voiced by Kevin Spacey) has tremendous screen presence: equal parts school bully and mob boss, sliding between outright cruelty, malicious sneering and mocking faux-friendliness, his exoskeleton crackling with every movement. And he looks pretty creepy to boot.

Regrettably, Hopper is the only character to be really fleshed out. The cricus bugs have plenty of funny lines, but that's all they are - lines. And the gags are spread to thinly to make up for what is - sadly - a very weak story. Throughout much of the film I was waiting for the confrontation between the good guys and the grasshoppers, and a good film doesn't leave the audience waiting. A Bug's Life just doesn't throw in enough twists along the way.

At the end of the day, the best thing that can be said about A Bug's Life is that it's not a rehash of Toy Story.

Let's get the inevitable but nescessary comparisons with 'Antz' out of the way:

'Antz' is a more sophisticated film which adults will appreciate on an adult level, but which kids will also like. 'Bug's Life' is a kid's film which probably won't hold the attention of most adults, though it's still a very good movie.

I prefer 'Antz' - see my review of it - but 'Bug's Life' is hard not to like. It rates nearly as highly, and ultimately it's getting three stars just because I had to put some space between it and Antz, which I gave three and a half (Athena, I wish we could give things percentages :) ) If anything irks me, it's that 'Bug's Life' squashed 'Antz' at the box office, when 'Antz' deserved to do at least as well.

This was Pixar in their 'can do no wrong' period (most would argue that period has never ended, but I'll get to that in another review). I didn't think 'Bug's Life' was as great an achievement as 'Toy Story, but the next year they released the amazing 'Toy Story 2', and proved they were the benchmark for modern animation.

To keep it simple, there is nothing I can think of which I dislike about Bug's Life. It's just that I could have liked it more. The characters look rather smooth and errr... rubbery, which not only contrasts with the rather angular, textured look of characters from 'Antz', but proves they could animate (albeit stylised) organic characters convincingly, not just toys. The one exception I remember is the bird, which I always thought looked conspiciously inferior, as if they'd farmed that character out to animators in Guam (yes, I'm talking about the 'real' bird, not the fake one). I guess I can see a possible excuse there: maybe the real bird was made to look fake, so the General would be fooled into thinking it actually was fake, but if that's the case, if they had to deliberately animated the bird to look fake, it's a weakness in the writing anyway.

The story is well paced, and if Flik is an underdog hero who we've seen a million times now, and most of the other characters are stock material, there aren't any glaringly annoying characters either (interesting, when you think about it. Bakshi gets slagged off for using stock footage, but Pixar and Disney get away with using stock characters. I guess there's a huge eye candy element to animation)

So, that's it, really. It gets three stars because they could have tried a little bit harder and made it a three and a half. Good film. Good fun. Bears up under repeated viewings. Not Pixar at their absolute best, but a worthy effort.

80% (that's about three and a quarter stars)

What's the formula Disney follows in about 80% of it's cartoons?

Lovable misfit can't fit in, tries to fit in, causes some horrible tragedy, whines 'it'a all my fault' and feels sorry for himself, then pulls himself together and saves everyone.

There ya go: Bug's Life in a nutshell.

Still, it's got its moments. The scene of chaos where the leaf falls across the line, for example. And the certifiably insane PT Flea. And the caterpillar (Heimlich, great name) turning into a butterfly.

Kids will eat it up. Adults will enjoy a viewing or two, but there's not much depth there to keep you coming back.

Still, worth a look.

Bug's Life was the first 'new movie' I watched with this website in the back of my mind. By the time the film was finished and the theatre was starting to stir with people packing up their things, I had mentally tagged this movie with a three-star rating. As the credits rolled though, the 'bloopers' began and I laughed harder during those bloopers than I had during the entire film--I'm not exaggerating when I say the bloopers make this movie worth seeing. So as I left the theatre, wiping the tears of laughter from my eyes, I thought "okay, that raises it another half star."

I should also say that don't try to confuse "A Bug's Life" with "Antz" as they are very different films in both style and content. One element that marks A Bug's Life so completely is that this is a film that is whole-heartedly targetted to a younger audience. I mean, they have little kid ants who have this club called the Blueberries and another scene shows the little kid ants making a grade-school presentation to their 'warriors'.

The animation is appropriately impressive but, in my mind, Pixar didn't raise the bar much beyond the level of quality they achieved in Toy Story. Plus, if you stack that against what was achieved in Antz, the film loses some of its dazzle.