A Bug’s Life (1998)

I think that if I had seen this in 1998 it would have blown my little mind as much as Toy Story did. Watching it now, A Bug’s Life feels like a very impressive tech demo stretched over the bones of a feature film. There’s not a lot to the story or the characters, but while it’d struggle to fill out the expanded frame of a modern Pixar film, A Bug’s Life manages to say more with less. Not to do the whole “remember when children’s movies could be about dismantling fascism” bit, but Kevin Spacey’s despotic grasshopper villain gets killed so hard his followers repent and join the circus.

The characters are very thin, though, and most of the celebrity voice actors fall flat. It’s not an early Dreamworks-level issue, the movie isn’t written and animated around the likeness and shtick of its cast (Denis Leary’s male ladybug aside), but it’s Pixar’s second feature, very early days — how do you act like an ant or a grasshopper if you’re not the main ant or grasshopper or Richard Kind, you know? Everybody here is figuring things out from first principles, racing to make something that can live up to the bar Toy Story set. They don’t get there, but looking at what Toy Story became, maybe that’s not such a bad thing.