“No, Harry, no! Don’t look at the light!”

“I can’t help it! It’s so beautiful!”

Three years after Toy Story came out, Pixar decided to release its second-ever feature-length animated film, A Bug’s Life. A Bug’s Life focuses on a colony of ants who are essentially slaves to a group of grasshoppers, where they must gather enough food for not only themselves, but the grasshoppers as well, over certain periods of time. After embarrassing himself and being the cause of the colony losing all their food to the grasshoppers, the main character, named Flik, decides to set out on a little adventure to gather a group of warriors to defend the colony and fight the grasshoppers.

What definitely impresses me the most about A Bug’s Life is the improvement in animation that Pixar was able to make in just the three years that spanned between the release of Toy Story and this film. Toy Story, I think, still looks really good to this day, but I think A Bug’s Life is a bit of a better-looking movie simply because it goes in a much bolder direction when it comes to the animation itself. The story, while not necessarily better, feels a lot bigger and grander than the story from Toy Story, and thus, the world feels a lot bigger, sort of allowing Pixar to show off their animation skills a bit more. You can tell that they were much more confident and comfortable with 3D animation during the time they made it.

Just like Toy Story, A Bug’s Life also has its own little charming feel to it, only it feels a bit different. The story isn’t nearly as deep, but a lot of the characters, mainly the little girl named Dot, add a lot of light to the story (not that it’s particularly dark anyway), and make it more enjoyable than it would otherwise be. Even though I don’t find Flik, the main protagonist, to be all that interesting of a character, which I’ll talk about later, the same thing can definitely be said about him as well.

This movie is also surprisingly funny, too, and the thing I like about Pixar is that, unlike a lot of other animation studios that mostly make films targeted towards kids, they don’t rely on potty humor to be funny. The humor works really well for both children and adults, without going into either a bunch of fart or poop jokes, which there is actually one in this story, but it kind of fits, or jokes that only adults would understand. Most of the same jokes that I found funny as a kid in both this and Toy Story, I also find funny as an adult.

To be honest, though, A Bug’s Life is a pretty big step down from Toy Story in many ways. First off, the story is just really generic and not really all that interesting. It starts off in a way that you think it’s going to be sort of a Seven Samurai-inspired movie, but then it kind of ignores that after the “big adventure,” which takes up a shockingly short amount of the film’s runtime. I also didn’t find any of the conflicts in the movie to be interesting, either, and in fact, a lot of them felt forced, mainly any of the ones between Flik and his colony. The pacing isn’t great either, as the story meanders quite a bit. Even though it’s only about ten or fifteen minutes longer than Toy Story, it feels quite a bit longer than that.

I also just wasn’t all that invested in really any of the characters, including Flik. Flik’s whole character arc is that he wants to prove himself to his colony because he is kind of known as the guy who messes everything up all the time. There aren’t really many more layers to his character other than that. Also, the colony itself is hard to root for because of how antagonistic they are towards Flik, and how they can’t seem to decide most of the time whether they like him or not (that’s where the forced conflict between him and the colony comes in). Additionally, the group of “warriors” that Flik chooses doesn’t serve the story much at all; they really just feel like they're there because the writers needed to have Flik go on a little adventure at the beginning. Other than that, you could probably cut them out of the story entirely, make a few tweaks, and the conflict with the grasshoppers would have turned out pretty much the exact same way.

Speaking of the grasshoppers, there was a lot of material there for them to be really cool villains, because their introduction scene is honestly pretty good, but they end up being rather disappointing by the end. They never feel like a real threat to the ants, because at the end of the day, they rely on them for food, so you already know that they aren’t going to really kill or significantly harm any of them. Adding onto that, I get that this is a kids’ movie, but a lot of the comedic relief that involves them getting scared really easily, mainly towards the end, doesn’t help them feel any more imposing, either.

A Bug’s Life definitely isn’t a bad film, but when you compare it to what Pixar did before, it ends up feeling pretty underwhelming.