The Big Picture
- Pixar’s storytelling potential lies in exploring the perspectives of various concepts, which has resulted in insightful tales and imaginative moments.
- A Bug’s Life showcases the terrifying view of bugs, framing their lives as an epic struggle against oppression and independence.
- The film’s most intense moment involves a bird, portrayed as a horrifying monster from the bugs’ point of view, offering audiences a fresh and terrifying perspective on an otherwise harmless animal.
In its almost 30-year history of creating high-class animated features, Pixar has practically built its entire studio identity on telling enthralling stories from unexpected points of view. Their films have been able to create engaging pathos and thoughtful world building by telling stories of how the perspectives of toys, fish, and even abstract emotions are shaped by the bigger world around them. A kid destroying plastic playthings in his backyard can be seen as a mad scientist in Toy Story, a cute little girl entering the world beyond her closet door can be seen as a toxic biohazard in Monsters Inc. and an over eager dentist’s niece can be seen as a serial fish murderer in Finding Nemo.
While it has nearly reached parodic levels of how often Pixar gives life to objects, creatures, and even the elements themselves, exploring the perspectives of various concepts has proved itself a limitless well of storytelling potential for the studio. This philosophy helped create not only some of the studio’s most insightful tales and imaginative moments, but also one of the most terrifying moments in Pixar’s animated canon.
‘A Bug’s Life’ Showed a Terrifying View from a Bug’s Eye
As only Pixar’s second feature film after Toy Story, 1998’s A Bug’s Life was “an epic of miniature proportions” that chronicled the struggle between an industrious ant colony and a gang of grasshopper mobsters who abuse the meek ants’ productivity to supply themselves with food every year. In an inspired modern twist on the Aesop fable, the film paints the lives of bugs as a cutthroat world of authority and survival where the ants must rebel against the threat of not only the menace of the grasshoppers, but the larger world of nature around them. Dried up riverbeds become vast canyons, light rainfall becomes a biblical flood, and the seasonal falling of leaves become an omen for the end times. The film is quintessential Pixar in framing the life of bugs and ants as an epic struggle of oppression and independence.
Aside from the grasshoppers themselves, the film’s most ominous threat is that of a simple bird, which from the perspective of the film’s cast of bugs, becomes a horrifying monster. The Bird first appears in the scene where optimistic inventor Flik (voiced by Dave Foley) is trying to convince the gang of circus bugs he mistook for warriors to stay and help defend his colony from the grasshoppers. When Flik catches sight of the Bird’s nest, he and the other bugs make an immediate run for it, screaming in terror, because to them, the Bird is a large, terrifying creature. The scene then turns into an intense action-sequence that proves the bugs’ valor as warriors by staging a rescue mission of the ant princess Dot (Hayden Panettiere), who has fallen in the cracks of the dried up river bed and is at the mercy of the Bird’s appetite.
Even in Pixar Films, Birds Gotta Eat
The film portrays the Bird’s dangerous presence to bugkind with dramatic music, imposing cinematography, and monstrously booming sound effects like massive footsteps, screeches, and roars fitting of Jurassic Park. The Bird’s uncannily realistic design also made it aesthetically clash with the exaggerated cartoony designs of the bugs. The Bird’s carnivorous threat to insects gives the ants the idea to build a fake bird to scare off the grasshoppers, which ultimately fails in the film’s climax, but sets up the film’s most intense moment and Pixar’s most grizzly villain defeat. As a last ditch effort, Flik lures the villainous Hopper (Kevin Spacey) to the Bird’s nest. Initially convinced the Bird is yet another fake, Hopper finds himself face to face with the real thing, which he is deathly afraid of. The Bird picks up Hopper in its beak and feeds him to a nest full of baby birds as he is kicking and screaming to his demise.
On paper, a bird feeding a grasshopper to a nest of hatchlings is far from a horrific sight and is common in nature, but the way A Bug’s Life establishes the scope of its world and the perspective of its minuscule characters makes it a terrifying scene. The film’s most fear-inducing moments being brought on by a simple bird demonstrates how Pixar, even at the beginning of its legendary lineage, was able to offer audiences a fresh perspective on something they typically overlook.
