Fridge examples for A Bug's Life.
Fridge Brilliance
- When certain species of grasshoppers face a food shortage, they begin their transformation into locusts: a more gregarious, aggressive and ravenous morph that devours everything in their path. This probably explains Thumper's feral behavior: the meager offerings of the ants might be triggering the hungry grasshoppers to go into their "locust" phase, and either a.) Thumper was the only one affected, or b.) Thumper is the FIRST one to be affected.
- Though it should be noted the grasshoppers have a huge amount of food at their base, to the point Hopper himself said they didn't need to take any more food from the ants, he just wanted to torment them for the sake of feeling powerful. So rather than the ants' fault, it's Hopper who probably starved Thumper with as little offerings as possible to drive him feral and aggressive in order to be the best attack dog he could probably have at hand.
- At first glance it appears the writers failed to research ants, seeing as worker ants are mostly mindless instinct-driven drones. Then you realize that this story is about independence.
- The origin of Thumper's name. It's for irony value. He's named after a cute, fluffy little bunny-rabbit. In fact, this was completely intentional on John Lasseter's part.
- If grasshoppers broke into an anthill like that in real life, the ants would tear them apart. Which they kind of do at the film's climax.
- Any viewer responding to Hopper's speech about "keeping those ants in line" will involve this. At first, you think he's literally talking about ants and grasshoppers, but at some point you'll inject your own beliefs into it, and at some later point, you'll realize EVERY viewer injects their own beliefs into it.
- At the end, if you look, you see Molt dodging into the grass, not flying away, so he's not actually abandoning his brother. Just another feature that shows he's not evil. But at the same time he literally 'jumps out of his skin'. He's shed his old life. Now he can be a good guy, and become the Strong Man of the circus!
- Why did Hopper fall for Flik's Batman Gambit at the film's climax and mistake the real bird for another fake one? Well, Flik probably knew that, because of his Villainous Breakdown, Hopper's rage had blinded him from realizing the true terror of the situation until it was too late.
- When first arriving in the colony, Hopper uses his antennae to smell Atta, commenting that she doesn't 'smell like the queen'. Presumably the reason for that is because she hasn't inherited the queen's crown yet... which is a massive flower.
- Praying mantis males get their heads eaten off by the females after mating. No wonder Manny opted to marry a moth instead!
- The bird's portrayal seems to have been influenced by popular dinosaur movies; she towers over the bugs, has a Giant Foot of Stomping, her song sounds like a "roar" to the bugs, and just generally appears to be the bug equivalent to a certain Tyrannosaurus rex. Why would this be? Well, birds are modern day dinosaurs after all...
- It becomes clear that the movie is a sort of What-if, exploring what would happen if, in Aesop's "The Ant and the Grasshopper", the ant had found pity and given the grasshopper some of his food. It also becomes sobering when you realize Hopper and his fellow grasshoppers are descendants who have come to take advantage of the ants' tribute, having forgotten that it was because of just one ant's generosity that they have this way of life to begin with.
- Fridge-Awesome: One grasshopper is just that, a grasshopper. But if it's a swarm of grasshoppers, they're called "locusts". Locusts are often the cypher of pestilence, hardship and famine. Regardless what they were up against, Flik and the colony fought against a swarm of locusts!
- The ending of The Grasshopper and the Ants has two choices - the ants abandon the lazy grasshopper, or they take pity on him and invite him to teach their children to play music. In this version, you get both - the evil Hopper is consumed by hatred and dies even as he tries to kill Flik, while his good brother Molt leaves his life of decadence behind to work as a Strong-man in the circus, because if somebody wants to reform you should do everything you can to help them.
- Hopper tells Atta that as a leader, "everything is her fault". This applies to him as well; his oppression and cruelty towards the ants is what pushes them to rebel, first starting with them creating a fake bird to scare him. People can only take abuse for so long.
- Circus Performers would actually have many applicable skills as warriors as evidenced by the scene where they encounter the bird. They are physically fit, can keep their head in dangerous scenarios, The clowns are great at distraction tactics, the magician is good at misdirection, and they all are great at communicating and working as a team.
- The colony seemed to be more shocked at the fact that the giant bird was not the "warriors'" idea, but Flik's, rather than the revelation that their heroes were only mere circus freak. It's been established before that no one likes his ideas because they would always go wrong. His seed extractor thingy got them into this mess in the first place, so they wouldn't be confident in his ideas getting them out, so that's why Flik never spoke about the bird being his idea (And if the "liar revealed" thing is any indication, he probably said it was the troupe's idea).
- Another Fridge-Awesome moment for you: when the fake bird eventually DOES go wrong (Though with P.T.'s interference rather than its own malfunctions) and Hopper questions who thought up of it, Flik comes out heroically and states that it was his own, being 100% truthful and completing his character arc.
- The grasshoppers are presented in a manner reminiscent of a biker gang; in particular, the sound of the grasshoppers beating their wings in preparation for take off from their cantina/hideout after sounds remarkably like motorcycles revving up. Now, it may just be to make them intimidating, but they'd hardly be the first to connect grasshoppers and motorcycles.
Fridge Horror
- Remember those three grasshoppers that Hopper buries with the grain, and when you were a kid you thought that they crawled out at a later time and flew to the island? Guess what? He murdered them.
- This one could go either way, really. Given the oft-ignored Square-Cube Law, a real grasshopper would probably survive that. However, it seems perfectly in character for Hopper to kill them like that without care.
- Also, the fridge horror only works if you actually thought they survived. This troper never saw this scene as anything else than outright murder. Of course, if you start bringing physics into this movie, lotsa stuff starts making less sense. Like Flik being afraid of falling down the cliff when ants are so small they'd survive a fall from any height and so on.
- A deleted portion
of that scene confirms it — they’re dead.
- Hopper not killing Molt because of a deathbed promise to his mother might seem like a redeeming feature, right? WRONG! Notice how when Molt keeps annoying him he brutally attacks one of his gang that was just standing there. Given his murderous nature it's quite likely that he attacks, and possibly kills anyone that's on hand when Molt annoys him, in other words what would normally be a redeeming feature just makes him more dangerous.
- Consider how badly Hopper must have treated Molt while their mother was still alive for her to feel justified in making that request while she was dying.
- Rosie is a black-widow spider. She makes reference to her 12th husband dying. note
- Ever notice how one of Hopper's eyes is more cloudy and scarred then the other one? In one scene Molt mentions how Hopper was once attacked by a bird. During the climax, Hopper reacts badly when he thinks the bird plucked out Slim's eye. This paints the image that Hopper is so scared of birds because he almost lost his eye to a bird.
- Now that Flik has industrialized his colony, how long will it be before the ants overharvest and deforest (degrass?) the island?
- They won't. They are not that dumb. But if they do, they will temporarily migrate elsewhere and return when food is available again.
- Or they could just save a portion of their grain seeds (which they now have a lot more of than they need) for replanting. Sort of like how human civilization went from hunter-gathering to agriculture.
- It helps that grass grows back much faster than trees do.
- The ants only have two princesses: Atta and Dot. Anyone that knows how queens work in the insect world would know that a queen ant produces new young all the time throughout her life. The Queen is currently in her twilight and grooming Atta to succeed her. Even with the movie's ludicrous artistic license, you'd think she'd have more than just two daughters. Then you notice that Hopper's go-to tactic for keeping the ants in line is to threaten and/or kill a member of the ant colony's royalty as an example any time things don't go exactly right by him.
- This also puts Atta's anxiety about everything going right with the offering in a new light.
- When Flik first suggests his plan to leave the island to find warrior bugs to fight the grasshoppers, all of the other ants make it clear that they think it would be a suicide mission - any ant trying to leave would either fall to their deaths from the cliff, die of exposure on the dry riverbed, or be eaten by birds or other predators. Even so, they have no problem letting Flik leave so he can't bother them anymore, even cheering his departure. Apart from Dot and Atta, they all fully expect him to die, and are HAPPY about it.
- Remember the green slug at the bar who takes a bite out of his dinner and exclaims, " I said NO SALT!!!" while foaming at the mouth? Now think about what usually happens to a slug when you pour salt on it and imagine that happening inside your mouth/body.
- Said slug appears again in another shot...and he's still eating.
- Thumper's entire situation reeks of this. He acts as a vicious attack dog, yet he's a grasshopper just like the rest of Hopper's gang, and their species is fully sentient in this universe, just like most of the other bugs. It's very possible that he's not merely a trained attack animal, but an extremely mentally ill individual whose unhinged condition is being taken advantage of by his own fellow grasshoppers, who are all too happy to treat him as the killer beast he believes he is instead of getting him any sort of help.
- Tying in with how it's known that grasshoppers become aggressive and ravenous locusts in times of food shortage, did Hopper intentionally starve Thumper to turn him into an Attack Animal?
- As insects are sentient species in this universe, this means humans are seeing multiple sentient races who are just trying to get by as disgusting vermin and are employing various means to exterminate them. In other words, humans are unknowingly guilty of Third Reich-level atrocities.
- Hopper didn't realize that the real bird was not a fake until it screeched in his face and gave him a good glimpse at the inside of its mouth. When you recall Molt telling the story of how a blue jay nearly killed him, he mentions that the jay had him at the back of its throat. So, Hopper would know real well firsthand what the inside of a bird's mouth would look like.
