Trivia / A Bug's Life

• Accidentally Correct Zoology:
  • Dim was supposed to be a fictional variation of generic rhinoceros beetle, not based on any species known to exist at the time. Eight years after the film's release, however, a new variety of rhinoceros beetle (Megaceras briansaltini) was discovered in 2006, with a horn identical to Dim's; because of this, similar phenomena were categorized as "the Dim Effect."
  • The behavior of the grasshoppers—move to an area, eat everything, move on—is more in line with locusts than grasshoppers. However, it's since been discovered that some species of grasshoppers can morph into locusts under the right conditions, so the movie got it half-right.
• All-Star Cast: Similar to rival film Antz, this movie is filled to the brim with familiar names providing voice roles, including (but certainly not limited to) Dave Foley, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kevin Spacey, Phyllis Diller, Denis Leary, David Hyde Pierce, Madeline Kahn, and Roddy McDowall.
• Blooper: The line "Your dad's right, he's gonna die" is lip-synced to the wrong ant.
• Beam Me Up, Scotty!:
  • One of Heimlich's lines is often quoted as "Do not listen to them, they are poo-poo heads!" when the line is actually "Francis, leave them alone! They are poo-poo heads!"
  • A part of Hopper's "puny little ants" speech to his minions often gets misquoted. He does not say "And if we let them figure that out ^note That they outnumber the grasshoppers 100 to 1 there goes our way of life!" He simply says, "And if they ever figure that out, there goes our way of life!".
• Bury Your Art: This is one of the few Pixar movies that Disney and its viewers barely ever bring up.
• Children Voicing Children: Dot's voice actress, Hayden Panettiere, was only nine at the time of recording.
• Creator's Favorite: P.T. Flea is John Ratzenberger's favourite Pixar role, because "in real life, I always get a kick out of those kinds of characters, people who just go into a rage for [no] explicable reason. He was always on edge. His blood pressure was always way over the top, and everything that he did was done in a panicked state. So it was a lot of fun to play him."
• Creator's Favorite Episode: John Lasseter describes the film as "One of the most beautiful movies we ever made".
• Deleted Scene:
  • An alternative opening would've been set 20 Minutes in the Future, where the colony became a museum and an old ant lady with a group of ant kids would tell the backstory of the grasshoppers and the ants and how when one ant made a difference. The directors cut the scene because they felt it would've been too much like a fairy tale.
  • A scene with the Circus Troope visiting P.T. Flee's office would've been included after the disastrous flaming death act. It was cut because it was clear from the previous scene that they were fired.
  • Originally, when Hopper crushes the three grasshoppers in a pile of grain, there was a shot where one of the grasshoppers's hands stopped moving.
• Descended Creator: The late Joe Ranft voiced Heimlich. He was originally just a scratch voice but Lasseter's wife convinced him to cast him.
• Development Gag: After scaring away the rest of the grasshopper gang, the ants carry Hopper over to the circus bugs' cannon and prepare to launch him from it. This is a reference to the original draft of the script, where Hopper is defeated by shooting him from a cannon into the sunset.
• Dueling Movies: With DreamWorks Animation's Antz. The plots are nothing alike, but how many movies do you know that are set in an ant colony?^note The makings of this duel ultimately led to Disney CEO Michael Eisner, who was one of the men who forced this, being forced to make an ungraceful exit from Disney lest they lose Pixar.
• DVD Commentary: With director John Lasseter, co-director and writer Andrew Stanton and editor Lee Unkrich.
• Executive Meddling: For the confrontation in the bar, Pixar's animators had planned out a large, anime-esque sequence, not unlike the one later seen in the movie Horton Hears a Who! (2008). Disney suits didn't understand the scene as it was laid out to them, and the gag was reduced to Francis saying, "Shoo, fly, don't bother me."
• Keep Circulating the Tapes:
  • The version on VHS and DVD that re-rendered some scenes to fit 1.33 (square) TVs has never been included on an HD or 4K release. A Justified Trope as HD/4K coincided with TVs becoming rectangular and being better showing the film's original 2.35 ratio (or, at least, showing just as much of the black bars regardless of which version plays).
  • The second half of the Animated Outtakes from the VHS and DVD releases aren't present in the Blu-Ray credits, though the full version is available by itself as one of the special features.
• Kids' Meal Toy:
  • McDonald's sold wind-up toys, watches, and trading cards in their Happy Meals in 1998.
  • In the 2000 holiday season, McDonald's released toys of Flik, Dot, and Heimlich as part of their "Disney Stars" Happy Meal, which also included toys based on Toy Story 2, Winnie the Pooh: Seasons of Giving, The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, Mickey's Once Upon a Christmas, and Dinosaur.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Wally Wingert does the voice of Flik whenever Dave Foley is unavailable.
  • Andrew Stanton provides the voice of Hopper for the video game and the It's Tough to Be a Bug! attraction at Disney's Animal Kingdom.
  • The video game saw all of the original voice cast return, with the exceptions of Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Kevin Spacey, and Denis Leary. Atta, Hopper, and Francis were voiced by Jodi Benson, the aforementioned Andrew Stanton, and Nick Jameson, respectively.
• Playing Against Type: Alex Rocco (best known as the villainous Moe Greene in The Godfather) and Roddy McDowall (who as an adult slid easily into villainous roles) play good characters.
• Posthumous Credit: A Bug's Life was released one month after Roddy McDowall, who voiced the queen's advisor, succumbed to lung cancer.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot:
  • By the late 1990s, CG had moved on a bit from everything looking like hard shiny plastic—but not so much that the animators were confident doing soft or fluffy characters, so they made a movie full of bugs with hard shiny exoskeletons. While it has some thin "fuzz" on it, the bird is mostly textured to look like it has feathers, rather than having actual ones rendered.
  • P.T. Flea's millipedes that pull his circus train are rarely seen in closeups because they were notoriously difficult to animate, and part of the reason the circus bugs pull the train up to fly it away at the end was an excuse to avoid having to animate them moving again since the epilogue was animated close to the end of production.
  • In the original story pitch, the climax was going to take place on a dam, where it would then break and flood the colony. Due to the difficulties with animating water physics, this was changed to rain to make it easier on the animators.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The first draft of the script was much different from the final version. The circus bugs' intentions were more intentionally selfish, as they meant to trick the ants by performing circus tricks that looked like fighting techniques so they could freeload off the ants and their resources. The climax also took place on a dam built by the ants that Hopper destroys, flooding the colony in the climax. Also, Hopper was actually going to be defeated by being shot out of a cannon—the final product has the ants load him into the cannon, but the rain hits before he can be launched.
  • Many characters were also changed or added from the original draft:
    • Flik was a red ant named Red who was the ringmaster of the circus bugs, until he became a member of the colony and P.T. Flea replaced him.
    • There was originally a family of ladybugs in the circus troupe who performed acrobatics. These roles were eventually split into the acrobatic pill bugs Tuck and Roll and the ladybug clown Francis, although before the change Tuck and Roll were a daredevil duo of pill bugs.
    • Rosie was a male spider part of a high-wire act.
    • Dot was completely absent.
  • Jim Carrey was considered to voice Flik.
  • John Lasseter's top choice for Hopper was Robert De Niro, who turned it down.
  • The video game adaptation, which officially had versions released for the PlayStation, Nintendo 64, PC, and Game Boy Color was also planned to have versions released for the Game.com, Sega Saturn, and Sega Dreamcast, but none of those versions got released.
• Working Title: Bug Story (changed to distance it from Toy Story), and at one point just Bugs.

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