A Bug's Life (1998) on Netflix
G19981h 35mAdventureAnimationComedy
Each summer Hopper's grasshoppers collect a share of the harvest from the ants of Ant Island. Flik, an inventor the colony distrusts, ruins the offering and sets out to find warrior bugs.
- Netflix3.8/5
- IMDb7.2/10341,551 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes92%
Trailer
Plot summary
Ant Island's ants live in a seasonally dry creekbed under an elderly Queen and her daughter, Princess Atta. Every summer they hand food to a gang of grasshoppers under Hopper's command. Flik is a kind-hearted inventor whose ideas the other ants distrust, and when his grain harvester spills the offering, Hopper demands twice as much food in return. Flik suggests recruiting bigger bugs to fight, so Atta, who wants him out of the way, sends him off. He reaches the city, a heap of trash beneath a trailer, and there takes a group of unemployed Circus Bugs to be the warriors he is seeking. They in turn believe he is a talent agent, and head back with him to Ant Island.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about A Bug's Life (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Jeffrey Katzenberg offered to delay production of Antz if Steve Jobs and Disney would move A Bug's Life so that it did not compete with The Prince of Egypt. Jobs believed it was "a blatant extortion attempt" and would not go for it.
- Lasseter's top choice to voice the villain Hopper was Robert De Niro, who repeatedly turned the part down, as did a succession of other actors. Kevin Spacey met Lasseter at the 1995 Academy Awards and signed on immediately.
- This was the first Pixar film to use subsurface scattering, a technique co-founder Edwin Catmull had developed as a graduate student at the University of Utah in the 1970s. Catmull asked for a short film to test it, and the result, Geri's Game, was attached to A Bug's Life in cinemas.
- A few days before the world premiere, the film was screened at Camp David because the movie theater in the White House was under renovation, and the crew visited the Oval Office the day after the screening.
- A Bug's Life was the final film appearance of actor Roddy McDowall, who played Mr. Soil and died shortly before the film reached cinemas.
- Ranft played Heimlich the caterpillar at the suggestion of Lasseter's wife, Nancy, who had heard him playing the character on a scratch vocal track.
- A Bug's Life was the first home video release created entirely from a digital transfer, with every frame of animation converted from the film's computer data rather than the standard analog film-to-videotape process.
