We Love Pixar: What I Learned From ‘A Bug’s Life’
by Charles C. JohnsonPixar’s A Bug’s Life has shown that Disney’s old trick of retelling a fable can be made interesting and wholly new. For A Bug’s Life really is a retelling of Aesop’s The Ant and the Grasshopper, with a twist: The hero of the ants is an inventor or even, an entrepreneur, who, as the tag line notes, goes on an “epic of miniature proportions” to rescue his colony from the roving bands of grasshoppers who raid their island. With such a character, Pixar combines the patient dedication of the ant to his future with the wonder that belongs to the entrepreneur.

I am referring, of course, to Flik, an ant among ants. Flik is innovative while his fellow ants are staid. As with all innovators, Flik brings a bit too much creative destruction to the ant colony. (See Edison’s burning of his parents’ barn, for instance.)
His mechanical harvester could serve to liberate the ants from their drudgery, but instead, causes his exile when it malfunctions and forces the ants in further hock to the grasshoppers. (more…)






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