50 Fun Facts About A Bug's Life

Who directed the film?

Stanton co-directed, a role Lasseter created to groom him for Finding Nemo.

Which Aesop fable inspired the plot?

Stanton and Ranft's twist was that the grasshopper would come back with a gang and simply take the food.

Who voices Flik?

The NewsRadio star headed a cast full of sitcom actors of the day.

Who voices Hopper?

Lasseter's first choice, Robert De Niro, turned it down repeatedly; Spacey signed on after meeting him at the 1995 Oscars.

Who voices Princess Atta?

She was starring in Seinfeld at the time.

Who voices Dot, Atta's little sister?

Ashley Tisdale voices the leader of the Blueberry Scouts that Dot belongs to.

Who voices Molt, Hopper's dim younger brother?

The Spin City actor's character ends up as a circus strongman.

David Hyde Pierce voices Slim, which kind of insect?

The Frasier star's clown is forever used as a stand-in for stick-like props.

Who voices Heimlich the caterpillar?

Lasseter's wife Nancy heard the story artist on a scratch track and suggested he keep the role.

Denis Leary's Francis is which kind of bug, constantly mistaken for a female?

He reluctantly becomes den mother to the Blueberry Scouts.

Who voices Manny, the English-accented mantis magician?

The Lost in Space star's wife and assistant, Gypsy, is voiced by Madeline Kahn.

Bonnie Hunt voices Rosie, which kind of creature?

Rosie acts as 'tamer' to Dim the rhinoceros beetle.

Which Pixar regular voices P.T. Flea, the circus ringmaster?

He has voiced a character in every Pixar feature since Toy Story.

Brad Garrett voices Dim, which kind of insect?

The Everybody Loves Raymond star's blue beetle carries the other performers around.

Which veteran actor made his final film appearance as Mr. Soil?

He died shortly before the film's theatrical release.

What is the name of the ants' home?

It sits on a small hill in the middle of a seasonally dry creekbed.

What is 'the city' Flik travels to?

There he mistakes a jobless circus troupe for warriors, and they mistake him for a talent agent.

How does Flik accidentally anger Hopper at the start?

His grain harvester knocks the whole offering into the creek, and Hopper demands double.

What do the ants build to scare the grasshoppers?

Flik's crude ornithopter works until P.T. Flea sets it on fire.

Who sets the ants' decoy on fire, ruining the plan?

He is fooled by the bird too and attacks it to save his troupe.

How does Hopper meet his end?

He taunts the bird, convinced it is another fake.

What emerges from Heimlich's cocoon at the end?

Francis and Manny carry him off as he flaps his undersized butterfly wings.

Which three other Pixar films were conceived at the same 1994 lunch as this one?

Lasseter, Stanton, Docter and Ranft made up the studio's head story team.

Flik was originally which circus-bug character before Stanton's rewrite?

In the first draft the Circus Bugs came to cheat the colony, which Stanton decided made them unlikable.

Lasseter envisioned the film as an epic in the tradition of which movie?

Critics still compared the bandit-plagued colony to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.

What was the 'Bugcam'?

Pushed through grass on a stick, it showed the translucent stained-glass canopy insects live under.

Which French documentary did the team study for inspiration?

The 1996 film looks at love and violence in the insect world.

How many legs were the film's ants given?

Designers swapped six legs for two arms and two legs and removed mandibles to make them likable.

Up to how many ants appear in the biggest crowd shots?

Bill Reeves led software that let a few dozen 'universal ants' be randomly varied into crowds.

Which rendering technique was used in a Pixar film for the first time here?

Ed Catmull had developed it as a graduate student at Utah in the 1970s.

Which short played before the film in theaters?

It was made to test subsurface scattering and won the Oscar for animated short.

Which rival ant film opened a month earlier?

DreamWorks moved it from spring 1999 to October 1998 to beat Pixar to theaters.

Which DreamWorks co-founder did Pixar accuse of stealing the idea?

Lasseter had described the film to him in detail during a 1995 visit.

Which DreamWorks film was scheduled to open the same week, fuelling the feud?

Katzenberg offered to delay Antz if Pixar would move away from it; Jobs called that extortion.

Which studio had DreamWorks acquired to make Antz?

PDI had long been Pixar's contemporary in computer animation.

Who composed the score?

He won a Grammy for Best Instrumental Composition for it.

What is the title of the one vocal song on the soundtrack?

It is the only song on an album of otherwise orchestral cues.

Where was the film screened a few days before its premiere?

The White House movie theater was being renovated; the crew visited the Oval Office the next day.

A teaser for which film had people buying tickets just to watch the trailer?

Some moviegoers left before A Bug's Life even started.

What was added to theatrical prints a few weeks into the run?

No real outtakes exist for an animated film, so they were animated specially.

What home-video milestone does the film hold?

Every frame came straight from the computer data rather than a film-to-tape transfer.

How much did the film gross over the five-day Thanksgiving opening?

It beat 101 Dalmatians' record, which Toy Story 2 then broke a year later.

What was the film's worldwide gross?

Antz, by comparison, earned about $172 million.

In the UK, the film was the third-biggest of 1999 behind Episode I and which film?

It spent five weeks at number one there before Patch Adams took over.

What was the film's Rotten Tomatoes score?

Later retrospectives have nonetheless ranked it among Pixar's weaker films.

With which film did it tie for the first Broadcast Film Critics Best Animated Film award?

It also took the Satellite Award for Best Animated Film.

Which 3D show based on the film ran at Disney's Animal Kingdom from 1998 to 2025?

A version also ran at Disney California Adventure from 2001 to 2018.

Which studio developed the tie-in video game?

GameSpot called the PlayStation version a $40 advertisement for the movie.

Which sequence was animated first because it was 'less likely to change'?

It ends with P.T. Flea's Flaming Wall of Death.

Which 1934 Disney short had earlier adapted the same fable with a cheerier ending?

Disney Feature Animation had also toyed with an Army Ants film in the late 1980s.