A BUG'S LIFE (74) (second viewing: 64)

Directed by: John Lasseter

With the voices of: Dave Foley, Kevin Spacey, Julia-Louis Dreyfus

The Pitch: A resourceful ant sets off in search of 'hired guns' to protect his beleaguered colony from marauding grasshoppers.

Theo Sez: Full to the brim - and beyond! As in TOY STORY, the pile-up of twists and can-we- top-this? plotting can occasionally seem de trop - but you know you're in for something special right from the moment Disney's staid logo gives way to Pixar's demented desk-lamp hopping across the screen, trampling the "i" in the company's name. Mischievous digs at the corporate parent ("It's one of those circle-of-life things," explains the chief grasshopper of his rapacious ways) are just one of the film's many hues, ranging from kid-friendly slapstick (lots of falling over and bumping into things) to clever puns and unexpected references (like the ant who "played the lead in 'Picnic' ") to bursts of cinematic dexterity (breaking up the exposition of Flick's plan into three parts, each narrated by a different bug to progressively larger audiences) ; the secret lies in its inventiveness, the fertility of its imagination, a dizzying succession of false climaxes and mistaken identities spiced with a steady stream of insect-flavoured gags - Flick's arrival in the Big City (a neon metropolis straight out of an old Warner Bros. montage) takes in a beggar fly sitting forlornly on the pavement (behind a sign reading "Kid Pulled My Wings Off"), a centipede mime scaling invisible walls with his pairs of hands, a bar-band playing "I Know An Old Lady Who Swallowed A Fly", a mosquito drowning his sorrows in Bloody Marys, a fly calling out, "Hey waiter, I'm in my soup!" plus a clutch of other gags, all in a minute or two of screen time. Wit, pace and narrative precision - even the (ahem) moth-eaten bit where the bugs band together to cheer up our hero, each in his Own Special Way, goes down painlessly ; you forget about the technical brilliance, which is as it should be. [Second viewing, December 2015: All of the above largely true (though the false climaxes felt a bit endless this time) - it's just that we didn't realise this kind of thing was going to turn into a genre, back in '98. A bright and bouncy Pixar, but the energy is now familiar and it's lacking the ambition of WALL-E, RATATOUILLE, etc. Sign of the times: flaunting what computers can do - a focus-pull, a crane-up from a reflection in the water - in the opening minute, though not so much in the next 94.]